[WikiEN-l] WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 106, Issue 7

[Alan Liefting]

On 19/05/2012 11:21 a.m., Horologium wrote:
> On 5/16/2012 11:04 PM, wikien-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org 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!
>>
>> Would anyone in this thread (especially the ones convinced Wikipedia's
>> editing community is in fine shape) care to predict what percentage or
>> percentage range they expect will have been reverted?
>>
>> Or what percentage/percentage range they would regard as an acceptable
>> failure-to-revert rate?
>>
> I just went through 19 random pages (9 of them didn't have any ELs, so 
> I didn't count them, and I found three articles in which the last EL 
> was not a useful link. One of them was a spam link to a (non-WMF) 
> wikiproject, one was a link to a find-a-grave page with a photo of the 
> subject (unneeded because we already had a photo of the subject), and 
> the third was a link to the presidential library in which a specific 
> judge's papers are archived. (That last would be relevant in an 
> article about the judge, but not so much for the article about the 
> district court for which he was the chief justice for ten years; I 
> actually went and added the link to the article on the judge, which 
> didn't have such a link.) That looks like a 30% fail rate. We'll see 
> how many of them get reverted, but I suspect that it won't be many, 
> because I didn't go through and randomly remove ELs, and I edited 
> logged in; for some reason, people who have been administrators for 
> four years with over 18,000 edits tend to get reverted far less than 
> IP editors. (Go figure.)

In my experience the external links section is maybe a little bit 
sloppier than the rest of an article.  Probably because of drive by 
edits, spammers, and good faith edits by lazy editors (those who want to 
add something but take the easy option).  The guideline at WP:EL is 
pretty good.


Alan Liefting