[WikiEN-l] Link removal experiment; Re: "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 8:31 AM, Carl (CBM) <cbm.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course there are good external links, but they
> are a minority on the articles I follow. Examples include these
> removals:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scala_%28programming_language%29&diff=prev&oldid=489800521
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HUD_%28video_gaming%29&diff=prev&oldid=487559372

I actually find your examples amusing. The HUD link was one of the
ones I was seriously considering not restoring because it was a junk
link; while I was especially disappointed to see that the Scala
editors did not restore the link for what is not just their standard
IDE, but a major reason for use of their language, an examplar of
their close alliance/fusion with Java, and a vital resource to link
especially given how impoverished the external links section was. (And
I've never written a line of Scala in my life!)

> Separately, the median number of watchlisters for the 100 pages you
> edited is 5.

Where is this figure coming from?

> And we have no way to get the names of the watchlisters
> to see whether they are active. So for many of the pages, it seems
> plausible nobody even noticed that the link was removed. That is a
> separate issue unrelated to links.

If the community "exists" but is inactive, that's as bad as it not
existing. Wikipedia is as Wikipedia does. Either way, the test is
revealing.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net