6 Comments

1. Paulien Dresscher
   Posted October 23, 2007 at 4:39 pm | Permalink

   am so enjoying this sequel :)

2. Michael Stevenson
   Posted October 23, 2007 at 5:36 pm | Permalink

   I was surprised that the page http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinplant no longer appears in Google’s results. However, I checked and this is because Wikipedia adds a ‘noindex’ tag to pages that have been deleted or have not been created. While it is impossible to say with certainty, this probably also means Google’s cached version of the page has been deleted.

   Thus it is only with slightly twisted logic that we can conclude that, alongside the previous maxim ‘what is not relevant cannot appear in Wikipedia’, there is another: ‘what does not appear in Wikipedia cannot be relevant’.

3. Roman Tol
   Posted October 23, 2007 at 8:13 pm | Permalink

   reminds me of a discussion regarding the shocklog entry in wikipedia (last year)… following michael, was sjoerd van der helm’s ma-thesis (about the shocklog phenomena) a complete waste of time (as there is no shocklog entry in wikipedia)?

   by the way, are you sure ‘relevant’ is the right word? I mean, isn’t wikipedia flooded with trivia?

4. Michael Stevenson
   Posted October 23, 2007 at 10:11 pm | Permalink

   @Roman
   Sorry, I was not being very explicit. My point was that by Google’s standards, this URL (http://nl.wikipedia.org/Spinplant) is relevant because of the great number of links to it. However, because of the ‘noindex’ tag it isn’t in Google’s search returns.

   So in other words, “what is not in Wikipedia” (the hidden spinplant page) “cannot be relevant” (does not appear in Google hits). This is simply a reversal of the problem we started with, both in the case of the shocklog and the spinplant (i.e. what does not appear relevant in Google cannot be in Wikipedia).

   Luckily, this play on words still only concerns a fictional plant and a blog genre!

   Hope this clears things up, I definitely do not mean that Wikipedia should be used to gauge relevance – that’s what Google does :)

5. Twan Eikelenboom
   Posted October 24, 2007 at 10:58 am | Permalink

   @Roman: About the trivia, I do know Wikipedia is trying to cut the trivia lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trivia_sections

6. Roman Tol
   Posted October 24, 2007 at 8:02 pm | Permalink

   thanks michael..

   anyway, twan, isn’t everything besides food, shelter and having unsafe intercourse at least once trivial?

   oke, I’ll quit now with the cynical remarks