[WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Carcharoth]

On 5/17/12, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Incidentally, I have been finishing an experiment involving the
> removal of 100 random external links by an IP; I haven't analyzed it
> yet, so I don't know the outcome, but this gives us an opportunity!

I carried out another experiment (though I didn't realise it was one
until now, and it is not a breaching one as yours seems it might be -
your wording above is unclear).

About six months ago now, I stumbled on an article that wasn't in
great shape, added some text over a series of edits, and increased the
number of links in the 'external links' section from 5 to 22. Now,
admittedly I wasn't editing as an IP (I always edit logged in) and I
added the external links in such a way as to make clear why they were
useful, but still, I didn't arouse some huge storm of editors
demanding that I reduce the number of external links (they are all
still there). The number of external links will reduce as the article
is expanded, but if you format external links and arrange them
logically, they can function as a holding place for sources to be used
later to write/expand the article.

Maybe that means that the question of external links is more one of
quality, and your analysis is oversimplistic? I submit that
well-formatted and well-chosen external links tend to stick, while
drive-by additions (or removals) don't. Which is not entirely
surprising.

Carcharoth

PS. We have gone way off-topic.