Wednesday, September 16, 2009


Who's a recognized authority?

Another debate on Wikipedia. What fun.

Wikipedia's article about "Churn rate" at this moment (though it won't last long) contains an external link to my blog post about churn rates. A couple of editors have indicated that the link is inappropriate, because I am not a "recognized expert" or "recognized authority" on churn rates. The blog post comes up as the #2 Google search result (after Wikipedia) when you search for 'churn rates', and it is this blog's most heavily visited page.

We have one party (me) wishing to help expand Wikipedia's usefulness by including one external link to a sourced, academically-cited blog post. The author's credentials include career work in the area of churn rate research, currently for a Fortune 100 firm where churn is an essential matter.

We have another party saying it is not sourced (even though it is), that the scholarly reference to it is merely a ".edu web page" (even though it is a published subscription journal with ISSN: 1527-6619), and that the author is not a recognized expert.

I've pointed out that Wikipedia has thousands of similar external links to commercial sites with far less expertise and scholarly credibility than my own. Who do you think has the more solid footing in this debate?

I hope that any uninvolved Wikipedia editors in good standing might help weigh in on this debate. Should the link stay, or go?



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4 Comments:

At 7:50 AM, October 28, 2009, Anonymous Marketing Research said...

Nice article, Thank you for sharing it.

 
At 4:49 AM, November 23, 2009, Anonymous Quantitative Research said...

Great post, Nice an excellent blog

 
At 2:19 AM, November 27, 2010, Blogger lsevenish said...

http://www.mediawiki.org/ is at the bottom of every mywikibiz page promoting mediawiki and Jimmy Wales, I find it interesting that the site clammering against wiki promotes it on every page and in the very title...every blog, etc etc. are you secretly working FOR them as a promoter>? I wonder...

 
At 8:58 AM, November 27, 2010, Blogger Gregory Kohs said...

Mediawiki is software. It was developed by Lee Daniel Crocker and Magnus Manske while Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales were struggling with UseModWiki. While I do have serious concerns with the graft and corruption that permeate the Wikimedia Foundation, why would I have a vendetta against software? Software doesn't "promote" Jimmy Wales.

Is this Limey raising these points against me? I would have expected better critique than that!

 

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