On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
One thing that might be interesting to track is the outgoing traffic from the images to the website of the Bundesarchiv (I suppose the credits link to them?). This might give us some insight as to what visibility these things actually bring to the organisations involved.
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I have ~200 images on Commons, used in ~2000 wiki articles in various languages. Those image description pages contain a link to my website, and collectively those links generate about 2.5% of my incoming web traffic. An additional 1% of my traffic comes from just 2 links that occur directly in enwiki pages. So, I would conclude that reference links on Commons images are individually of low value compared to the external links in articles. And both are largely insignificant compared to the 75% of my traffic that originates from search engines.
Obviously scaled up 500-fold may give the Bundesarchiv a more impressive result, but I don't think we can count on the power of those external links to dramatically alter people's perceptions.
-Robert Rohde