Hi everyone. In my new role at the University of Oxford (so new that I haven’t created a project page yet) a need that has come up that could be answered by a tool.

Researchers in the UK have to demonstrate to funders that their projects have impact. Impact includes *reach* (how many people saw the outputs of the project) and *significance* (how many citations the outputs got, especially from government or academic sources, and how they changed discussion around the topic). The existing GLAM-Wiki stats tools are excellent for showing reach, and thus for persuading researchers to contribute directly to Wikipedia.

Significance is harder to measure. For an individual article, a Google backlink search will show where the article is linked from outside Wikipedia. But I’m working with projects that could improve hundreds of articles, so putting each URL into a search is impractical. A tool that summarised links to all the articles in a given category, organised by linking domain, would be a great measure of significance, and hence crucial for persuading researchers to improve Wikipedia articles in their fields.

Looking for APIs with backlink information has taken me into the murky corporate world of Search Engine Optimisation, and hence services that provide a lot of commercially-relevant information that we don’t need, and which require a subscription. I’ve found one free API which is very limited: https://moz.com/products/api/pricing  Google used to make this information available through an API, but doesn’t seem to now.

Does anyone have any suggestions on whether a backlink tool is possible and what would be needed to create it? I suspect this tool would be useful to the UNESCO Biospheres project as well as university research projects. Thanks in advance,

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Dr Martin Poulter

Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Oxford, based at the Bodleian Libraries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Oxford