On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 12:09 PM, Risker <risker.wp@gmail.com> wrote:

It sounds interesting, Laura. There are a couple of parameters that may create issues, specifically the gender and geolocation of editors of the articles (most editors do not gender-identify or specify their geographic location), but it's a pretty thorough review of the interrelationships between the various WMF projects and with external media.

On the research mailing list, there were suggestions that Google search rankings were the best way to measure influence... but I'm not sure the relative merits of that measurement as clicks through (that improve Google rankings) don't necessarily translate to "This article was assisted in shaping my thinking about a topic". The little research I've done suggests the regular media still gets more views to their website when a story breaks (especially as they have an active incentive to push their supremacy of their content over others, where Wikipedia's community is not as pushy in asserting that they should be the final word). I know some journalists and other industry people (Is the Vatican an industry person for religion?) have borrowed from Wikipedia, which would make Wikipedia more influential than raw page counts... but how do you measure that?

I'm pretty sure some variant could be done for other areas and languages with tweaking (such as female media figures in Spain) but want to make sure I have a core that makes sense as an approach as I'm about 75% certain I will be doing postgraduate research on this topic.

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