Ten new Wikipedia articles - 2009

-by Gregory Kohs, for Examiner.com
August 13th, 2010

No, I find it frankly useless. You can't make any real conclusions because n is so small, we have little to no information about how your sample was selected, and your conclusion ignores the existing "low-hanging fruit are gone" hypothesis completely in favour of little tidbits about how you're not making articles any more because Jimbo assaulted you with a banhammer.

I must also caution you that "list" articles are often considered poor form for blogging.

Yes if and only if you include Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Kubla Khan, and Ode: Intimations of Immortality. All have very interesting origins.

By the way, I have some new ones of similar importance that are being made up to replace some major copyvio problematic articles. That should be interesting too, but yeah.

I'm curious which part(s) of this sentence you found contained "little to no information":



What is it about new members of WR who criticize me and simultaneously think they know it all? Seurat, do you live near London, by any chance?

Were those articles the first 10 freshly-created articles you saw? Were they 10 consecutive new articles, or were there others? If so, how did it come about that certain new articles were skipped? At what time of day roughly was the sample taken?

It's evident how one finds new articles. I can figure that out myself. I can find little to no information about how you selected new articles. Without the specifics, no meta-analysis is possible. There are any number of ways that bias could creep into a sample, unwittingly or not, and without knowing the method of sample selection, I might as easily assume that the examples were cherry-picked as I might suppose that you carefully selected a random set of articles created within a certain time period. I don't mean to suggest that you did in fact cherry-pick those articles, but I point out that there's little to suggest that that's not the case. All I was hoping to see in the article was a minimal "I picked the first 10 I saw, at around teatime, making sure I didn't skip any."

I'm surprised that this sort of thing isn't obvious given your background. On the other hand, what precisely does "market research" entail?


I was not criticizing you, I was criticizing your work. If I wanted to criticize you, there are better approaches. I also have never claimed or implied that I am all-knowing, or even mostly-knowing. I merely claim to know a fair amount, and I will apply it if others do not. In this case, that "fair amount" includes the hypothesis that most of the "important" articles for Wikipedia have already been created, that the "low-hanging fruit" has been picked.* I think that it's fairly relevant idea when attempting to make conclusions about the relevance of sets of articles recently contributed to Wikipedia. No, I don't remember where it originated. It is, however, certainly more relevant than that you are banned and no longer contributing, a passage from your article which I believe could be roughly paraphrased as "neener, neener Wikipedia!"

As for London: who are you talking about? I don't believe I'm on your cast list yet for this drama.

*Unfortunately for everyone, very little of this low-hanging fruit has been baked into pie yet.

The last few articles you wrote were actually pretty decent, and weren't "all about how they were mean to poor Greg". Epic fail on this one... congrats on making a perfect target for Jimmy and Sue when they want to show someone that it's really just because you're butt-hurt, etc.

Well, to be butt hurt one has to be done in the butt rather roughly, so they would mostly be showing off their own work. ;/ (I'm sure there are other ways, or, I can assume someone would come up with other ways, but I think Kohs being raped is a good analogy. )

Ottava, it's 6 PM. Do you know where your Pastor is?

Oh, I cherry-picked the fuck out of the 10 articles, being that I took the first 10 I saw from a given moment in time, but skipping any that were mere administrative re-directs or renamed articles that already existed. I am the worst researcher on the planet, Seurat.




The last few were way better than "pretty decent", Johnny. For that, I'm postponing my visit to your goat farm. With friends like these...

Hiding from Ottava, I would imagine.

There has got to be a double entendre there.


That must be an awful burden to bear.

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In any case, you answered my question, and I'm satisfied. The hostility is not necessary. Is there some particular thing I said that hurt your feelings? If so, please let me know what it was, and I will edit my post to tone it down. Making you feel "butt-hurt" is not my goal, though I can't help a certain hint of inadvertent schadenfreude.

Kohs himself made an analogy about being raped with a broomstick when Wikimedia changed the license from GFDL to CC-BY-SA. Some minor Googling turns up him talking about "getting a dry broomstick where the sun don't shine."

Anyway, this is a bit off topic. We need a new thread about self-victimization and its use in argumentation should this be continued, and I think we ought to drop the disturbing innuendo in any case.

I think Ottava is giving the poor guy a bad rape ... er bad rap. (Sorry.*)

* I'm afraid I got carried away with the middle finger of my sinister hand.