Hi all,

Since the HTTP to HTTPS change last summer, a number of Wikipedia Library and GLAM partners have reported a drop in traffic reported as "referrals" from Wikipedia, where many of these referrals are being reported as organic referrals, effectively creating "dark traffic".

Dario Taraborelli from the research team, worked with Wikimedia Ops to find a solution to this problem. He and I are also working with a number of movement partners to understand this effect, and better assess how Wikipedia references provide referrals to frequently cited websites (see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikimedia_referrer_policy and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87276 ).

Last Tuesday (Feb 23) the ops team turned on a new "meta referrer tag" so that sites getting traffic via clicks from Wikimedia pages may see these referrals in analytics reports. Several publishers have of an increase in correctly labeled Wikimedia traffic.

Since this effect has been in place for about a week: you may want to let your partners at cultural heritage institutions know about this change. Historically, referrals have been a indicator of partnership success and a persuasive tool for organizations to participate, and the HTTPS change may have obscured this.

Moreover, if your GLAM partners would be interested in supporting by sharing referral traffic: we will be collecting partner analytics data from January 1 to March 30 in about a month. Let me know if you think your GLAM partner would like to participate.

Cheers,

Alex Stinson