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

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 7:47 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's no harm in discussing the methodology (but not the specific
> targets or IP addresses), thereby confirming its validity and ensuring
> that the effort isn't needlessly duplicated by multiple editors across
> countless articles.

Alright, fine, I will copy in my current writeup minus the list of
targets and the yet to be conducted analysis.

> Again, what if hundreds or thousands of users, whose methodologies are
> undiscussed and potentially flawed, were to take it upon themselves to
> conduct such "experiments" without consultation or approval?  That's
> the hypothetical scenario to which I referred.

It's unfortunate that I am such a prominent figure and powerful
thought-leader that hundreds and thousands of Wikipedians have even a
tiny chance of mimicking my actions; but that's a risk you just have
to take when you are as world-renowned as I am. I'm sure Kant would
understand.

---

...
The procedure: remove random links and record whether they are
restored to obtain a restoration rate.

- Editors might defer to other editors, so I will remove links as a
anonymous user from multiple proxies; the restoration rate will
naturally be an *under*estimate of what a registered editor would be
able to commit, much less a tendentious deletionist.
- To avoid issues with selecting links, I will remove only the final
external link on pages selected by
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random#External_links> which
have at least 2 external links in an 'External links' section, and
where the final external link is neither an 'official' link nor
template-generated. (This avoids issues where pages might have 5 or 10
'official' external links to various versions or localizations, all of
which an editor could confidently and blindly revert the removal of;
template-generated links also carry imprimaturs of authority.)
- The edit summary for each edit will be `remove external link per
[[WP:EL]]` - which has the nice property of being obviously
meaningless to anyone capable of critical thought (by definition a
link removal should be per one of WP:EL's criterions - but *which*
[criterion](!Wikipedia "Wikipedia:External links#Links normally to be
avoided")?) but also official-looking like many deletionist
edit-summaries.
- To avoid flooding issues and be less obvious, no more than 5 or 10
links a day will be removed with at least 1 minute between each edit.
- To avoid building up credibility, I will not make any real edits
with the anonymous IPs

After the last of the 100 links have been removed, I will wait 1 month
(long enough for the edit to drop off all watchlists) and restore all
links. I predict [at least
half](http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6586) will not be restored
and certainly not [more than
90%](http://predictionbook.com/predictions/6585).
...

-- 
gwern