Hi,
I had a chance to chat with some one today who is involved in the public sector about the potential importance of Wikimedia related projects to developing dialog, resources related to, and having a larger societal impact on women as it pertains to women's related coverage on Wikimedia related projects. Page views are one way to measure, and exposure for women's topics on the front page of Wikipedia through Featured Article, Did You Know, Featured Picture and In The News is certainly valuable in terms of total page views on the day for that content but the value is not very clear from a return on investment point of view. The same can even be said about taking an article from Stub to C class. There is some inherent value in doing this, but institutionally, getting support for it can be problematic unless you can begin to figure out a tangible way of assessing the value that can justify institutional resources into a project that is nominally for a greater good of promoting a topic such as women's health, women's sport, women's rights by just improving the ease of access to reliably sourced, neutral materials that adequately cover these topics.
Has anyone done any research on or developed a framework work doing research to measure the impact of Wikipedia and its projects on thought formation and how to measure the influence of Wikipedia in our society?