Hello,
I have had this request from a lot of partner organizations (~30). Although the request is common, and organizations say they want the data, I am not sure that if they had the data they would actually use it or know how to interpret it.
Just the same - if I could make a labor request of WMF staff, it would be for staff to create layman documentation on what it means to track incoming traffic from Wikipedia. My expectation is that more organizations would get more satisfaction from knowing that it is possible to track incoming traffic, even if they decided not to do this. Right now I mostly say, "It is difficult, I do not know, your IT department can tell you..." Instead, I wish I could say, "Here is the layman guide. It links to more detailed information."
Part of serving movement partners is offering them possibilities and giving them instructions. There is not always capacity to take advantage of options, but often having layman outreach materials opens doors and has value beyond assisting people in performing an action.
If there is someone clever and interested at the intersection of movement partner management and analytics, here is what I would request -
- Layman guide presuming no technical understanding
- making a case for tracking inbound traffic to their site through citations (not emphasizing external links)
- giving a timeless overview on how to do this
- linking to detailed more up-to-date instructions
I confirm that this would be useful. Getting organizations to actually collect and reflect on this data is a more complicated issue and will take time. I would be interested to read reports of any organization which does this.
yours,