The surprising result, to me, is how many people ended up on this portal page as the result of a search. That they weren't taken to a specific article page, nor to en.wikipedia.org, but here.

I notice that if you type just "wikipedia" into duckduckgo, it offers this portal as the "official site". I wonder if that is best, or if we would want to ask them to direct people to their best guess of the wikipedia language project that user might want.

My favorite answer to "How did you arrive at Wikipedia.org?":

"it's like arriving at Google or Youtube...you just arrive eventually."

Indeed.



Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation


On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 7:47 AM, Deborah Tankersley <dtankersley@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello,

The Discovery Portal Team recently completed a second running of a survey on the Wikipedia.org portal, using a non-intrusive banner, from June 13 through June 28, 2016. 

Our goal was to target those visitors that arrive at the portal page but don't actually do anything, as these "non-action" page visits account for about 43% of the portal's daily pageviews. We also wanted to see if we could get additional respondents to the survey by using a different bucketing system and running it for a longer timeframe.

We wanted to see if the results would indicate that many visitors have wikipedia.org set as their browser's default home page. Our thinking was that the non-action pageviews are occurring because each time a visitor opened up their preferred browser, their homepage would display the Wikipedia portal page but the user simply goes onto a different site without using the portal first.

The resulting data was very similar to our first running of the survey in May 2016, as shown in the attached graphs - displaying the breakdown of the June survey [1] and also displaying a comparison of May vs June survey results [2]. The results overall were that most visitors had bookmarked the site in their browser and the second most popular selection was that they typed 'wikipedia' to get to the portal.

I've also included a sanitized pdf [3] of all the 'other' answers to our survey, for those curious about the content of the free text answers that were collected. Some of the responses are fairly humorous "I took the 5 oclock train" and some were a bit more serious "I typed in the URL of the website.  Not the word "wikipedia" but "http://www.wikipedia.com". It's how I normally navigate to a website I know the name of." and we received plenty of love too "I love ❤ your site".

Our goal of trying to get those non-action visitors to do an action (namely to take our quick survey) probably failed miserably but, on the other hand, we received a lot of other really good information that will be quite useful to our future updates to the Wikipedia portal. 


Cheers from the Wikimedia Discovery Portal Team,

Deb, Jan and Mikhail


--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
IRC: debt
Wikimedia Foundation

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