I’m writing in hope of starting a conversation about Metrics
gathering for institutions. As a WiR that does a lot of outreach I’m regularly asked
what Metrics are available for them to track their projects. I think having a
formal page on WP of possible metrics/tools for institutions would be a sure way to
get institutions more engaged.
While the work of the Analytics Team is always on the
periphery I’ve found that there are not many tools or project documentation for analytics related to institutional engagement, editing, and article traffic for
institutions with a lot of articles “related” to their collections on Wikipedia
that they may be adding to.
I’m going to list
what I already use/know about to see if anyone has any other suggestions or
thoughts on this.
WikiMetrics: https://metrics.wmflabs.org/
- I use this after all edit-a-thon on the day after, and then usually about a
month after.
External links search: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=worldcat.org
– I recommend getting this number before institutional editing occurs, and also
noticing ‘trends’ in the ‘genre’ of articles referencing the institutional
resource websites, and then in time increments afterwards.
Google Analytics- to find article traffic to their digitized collections or other research that linked to from Wikipedia. IE the Met’s successful Watson Library project: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Case_studies/Thomas_J._Watson_Library_at_the_MMA,_New_York
Project Statistics: Article Quality ‘bot’ tables, and adding “WikiProject” tags to the talk pages of articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WP_1.0_bot/Tables/Project/Statistics
List articles desired, create a spreadsheet with these
article names and the number of visitors in the last 30 days using the “Page
View Statistics” graph in “View History.” Once that spreadsheet is made, I
recommend working on high-impact articles as well as adding lower-impact or
lesser-seen articles as interwiki links to more ‘high impact’ articles. I would
also tell them to update this list.
Do you have any other tools you like to use or ‘best
practices?’ This conversation can happen here or we can move it
to WP if that makes more sense to people.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Thanks!