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Cool. I will use the reference desk for what ever I need now! 70.171.224.249 (talk) 23:43, 2 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The criteria for a "novice/experienced" user are extremely flawed. As a result, that aspect of the analysis is pretty much useless.--Rockfang (talk) 01:16, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with Rockfang. Nearly 6 months editing/≈2000 edits, ≈342 on the Ref. Desk. [1] & I don't have a user page (yet). Novice? Almost a Journeyman Editor! --220.101.28.25 (talk) 06:01, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As great as that is, I certainly hope the 2010 RD regulars have been doing better than the 2007 ones. (average of four hours to answer?!) ALI ^{nom nom} 18:03, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think I read on the Ref Desk Talk page discussion of this paper that the author analyzed the first 10 questions on a specific day from each of 7 desks. This could create some sort of time zone effect affecting the speed of response, depending on when the date header rollover is w.r.t. when most editors are active.

But anyway, using that metric, and starting with the March 1 section headers (and without exhaustively going into how correct the answers are):

The Computing desk scores 3 hours 30 minutes on average (though there is one question still unanswered that I didn't include). Six questions were answered in under 20 minutes, one in 85 minutes, and the two that pulled the average down took more than 12 hours each.
The Humanities desk (disclaimer: I answered one of these, but long before thinking of this analysis) scores 3 hours 35 minutes on average (though again there is one question still unanswered). Only two questions were answered in under an hour.

Out of time to do any more but I think a four hour average is better than it first sounds. Best, WikiJedits (talk) 17:56, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was surprised to see that this research paper by Shachaf is not online. I wonder why? Ottawahitech (talk) 20:10, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder if they also analysed Q&A sites from the StackOverflow family. It seems to me their method of ranking answers would probably be the best way to avoid the time consuming task of choosing the best answer, as they mention. Also, I believe they'd have fared well, because of their smart karma system. --Waldir ^talk 08:04, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that in traditional library reference questions, we underperform, and in more expertise-related questions, we may overperform, due to the rather high level of talent and knowledge some of our reference desk regulars have displayed (over at math there are several people who are very clearly professional mathematicians fielding some fo the questions. Ray^Talk 15:13, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Same goes for the language desk; a traditional librarian is not likely to speak as many languages as all of our answerers put together do. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 19:46, 5 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]