On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 17:51, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com wrote:
Starting on Thursday Dec 4, Wikimedia Commons will witness a massive upload of new images. We are anticipating about 100.000 files from a donation from the German Federal Archive. These images are mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and are part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive.
These images are licensed cc-by-sa.
[snip]
The images are 800 pixel in size on the longer side, which is near the lower bound for being useful on the internet. We are aware of that, and we hope that after some time, we will be able to get the Archive to release the images in a higher resolution. The quality of the work of Wikimedia Commons might help this negotiation process.
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.
Even better would be to get statistics of how these outgoing links actually result in people buying the higher resolution prints to integrate in some publication (if they are for sale, of course).
Delphine
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.
<snip>
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
2008/12/5 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
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.
But you cannot exclude that you are higher in search engines cause of links from Wikipedia articles and images ;)
AJF/WarX
On Fri, December 5, 2008 2:07 pm, Artur Fijałkowski wrote:
But you cannot exclude that you are higher in search engines cause of links from Wikipedia articles and images ;)
MediaWiki nofollow's afaik.
Regards, Adrian
2008/12/5 peter green plugwash@p10link.net:
Doesn't wikipedia screw over the sites it reffers to theese days by using nofollow?
Only if you consider that the mission of Wikimedia is not (as the first party) to serve the readers (second party) with educational content, but to help a third party (SEO optimisers) get in good with a fourth party (Google). I can't see it there in the mission statement, myself.
- d.
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 7:42 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/12/5 peter green plugwash@p10link.net:
Doesn't wikipedia screw over the sites it reffers to theese days by using nofollow?
Only if you consider that the mission of Wikimedia is not (as the first party) to serve the readers (second party) with educational content, but to help a third party (SEO optimisers) get in good with a fourth party (Google). I can't see it there in the mission statement, myself.
On the other hand, I don't see where helping to better organize the web, as a secondary consequence of serving our readers, would contradict our mission either.
I can understand the argument of not wanting to deal with spam from SEOs, but I'm not sure that turning on nofollow actually made much difference in the level of linkspam at major wikis like enwiki. If there is evidence to the contrary, I'd like to see it.
-Robert Rohde
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:29 AM, peter green plugwash@p10link.net wrote:
But you cannot exclude that you are higher in search engines cause of links from Wikipedia articles and images ;)
Doesn't wikipedia screw over the sites it reffers to theese days by using nofollow?
Screw over? Hardly. We're not all playing some game of who can get the highest on the search results. I understand some people are, fine, but thats not what we're doing.
Moreover, "nofollow" is poorly named and the poor naming results in substantial misunderstanding. The way modern search engines utilize nofollow is primarly as an indicator of trustworthiness, it other words "how likely is the link to be spam?" not as some hard blockade against traversal. It's fairly easy to setup a webpage linked only from nofollow sources and see it quickly pick up a prominent position on google, if it contains suitably rare search terms and was linked from reasonably well placed webpages. Might it rank better if it was not nofollow? Perhaps.
As a signal to send to search engines "nofollow" is the right one for most links added to our projects: While most article text receives a reasonable amount of oversight, it strongly appears (and my own testing has demonstrated) that experienced Wikipedians simply do not follow external links that frequently (why would they? They take them away from their business on Wikipedia. As such, the external links are of lower quality. We indicate this to the search engines. Life is good.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:29 AM, peter green plugwash@p10link.net wrote:
But you cannot exclude that you are higher in search engines cause of links from Wikipedia articles and images ;)
Doesn't wikipedia screw over the sites it reffers to theese days by using nofollow?
Screw over? Hardly. We're not all playing some game of who can get the highest on the search results. I understand some people are, fine, but thats not what we're doing.
Moreover, "nofollow" is poorly named and the poor naming results in substantial misunderstanding. The way modern search engines utilize nofollow is primarly as an indicator of trustworthiness, it other words "how likely is the link to be spam?" not as some hard blockade against traversal. It's fairly easy to setup a webpage linked only from nofollow sources and see it quickly pick up a prominent position on google, if it contains suitably rare search terms and was linked from reasonably well placed webpages. Might it rank better if it was not nofollow? Perhaps.
As a signal to send to search engines "nofollow" is the right one for most links added to our projects: While most article text receives a reasonable amount of oversight, it strongly appears (and my own testing has demonstrated) that experienced Wikipedians simply do not follow external links that frequently (why would they? They take them away from their business on Wikipedia. As such, the external links are of lower quality. We indicate this to the search engines. Life is good.
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
I know this is off topic but I thought it might be just the thing for some body on the list. I have nothing in this.
Doug
Douglas Pollard wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:29 AM, peter green plugwash@p10link.net wrote:
But you cannot exclude that you are higher in search engines cause of links from Wikipedia articles and images ;)
Doesn't wikipedia screw over the sites it reffers to theese days by using nofollow?
Screw over? Hardly. We're not all playing some game of who can get the highest on the search results. I understand some people are, fine, but thats not what we're doing.
Moreover, "nofollow" is poorly named and the poor naming results in substantial misunderstanding. The way modern search engines utilize nofollow is primarly as an indicator of trustworthiness, it other words "how likely is the link to be spam?" not as some hard blockade against traversal. It's fairly easy to setup a webpage linked only from nofollow sources and see it quickly pick up a prominent position on google, if it contains suitably rare search terms and was linked from reasonably well placed webpages. Might it rank better if it was not nofollow? Perhaps.
As a signal to send to search engines "nofollow" is the right one for most links added to our projects: While most article text receives a reasonable amount of oversight, it strongly appears (and my own testing has demonstrated) that experienced Wikipedians simply do not follow external links that frequently (why would they? They take them away from their business on Wikipedia. As such, the external links are of lower quality. We indicate this to the search engines. Life is good.
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
I know this is off topic but I thought it might be just the thing for some body on the list. I have nothing in this.
Doug
Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
Sorry guys now I'm off topic on two lists. Doug