David and Sumana have passed on info from two outside projects that have added external links to Wikipedia articles and measured the results. I don't doubt the good faith of anybody here, nor the usefulness of the links, but I must note that this type of activity is almost certain to attract the attention of the hardworking (and equally good-faith) anti-spammers at WP:WikiProject SPAM. There's also a question of WP:COI involved.
As far as the attention grabbing aspect, please consider the following list from WP:WikiProject Spam of things that the anti-spammers look for: "How to identify spam and spammers
1.User is anonymous (an IP address)
2. User:page and/or User_talk:page are red links
3. No edit summary (other than, perhaps /* External links */)
4. User has made only one edit, which consisted of inserting a link
5. User has made multiple edits to related articles
6. The majority of user's edits are to external links sections"
There are 14 more points - but the two projects likely raised at least 3 of these red flags already.
Many Wikipedians absolutely hate spammers, and if an outside project raises these red-flags they are likely to get a bad result, just wasting their time. I do not have the complete answer of how to do this right and completely within Wikipedia rules, but I think the question needs to be raised.
Another example - just from this week. An anon apparently from the Society of Architectural Historians added a bunch of links to a new feature of their website which gives (gratis) text from their series of expensive books "Buildings of the United States". On my watchlist I saw red flags 1-3 at a glance and my first thought was spam. On closer examination, I saw it had all the attributes of spam, except that I really found the links useful. Others started deleting the links right away, and I had to take some time to defend the links. Clearly there is a problem here, which an uncritical reading of the 2 above projects would fail to address.
As I said - I don't completely know how to solve this problem, but my first reaction is that they should try to work with established Wikipedia editors.
I think I have to mention some of my recent related Wikipedia activities. I've been working on WP:Glam/smarthistory to insert external links (via the external media template) to Smarthistory's very useful and informative series of videos on art history. As far as I know, only one of these links has been deleted and there have been no complaints to the spam project, but there has been a bit of tension, simply because external links are involved. This is despite the fact that I am a completely independent editor with a long visible history of fighting against COI-editing.
In short - a straightforward reading of the 2 outside projects' write-ups is likely to lead to some problems. We should try to thrash out how to avoid these problems.
Pete Ekman User:Smallbones
Message: 2 Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:36:56 +0100 From: "David Haskiya" David.Haskiya@KB.nl To: "Wikimedia & GLAM collaboration [Public]" glam@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [GLAM] case study with statistics: libraries & archives should share on Wikipedia Message-ID: 9E81C54D7C665F4599EA05450BA9853D023888A8@goofy Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hi, You may know of it already but in case you don't.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library also published an interesting case study on the effects of citing/referencing to their authoritative sources on zoology, botany etc.:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/03/linking-to-biodiversity-heri tage.html
Cheers, David
Product Developer www.europeana.eu
Phone: +31 (0)70 3140 696 Mobile: +31 (0)64 217 2542 Email: david.haskiya@kb.nl Skype: davidhaskiya
-----Original Message----- From: glam-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:glam- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sumana Harihareswara Sent: zaterdag 16 maart 2013 18:32 To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities; glam@lists.wikimedia.org; A mailinglist for the Analytics Team at WMF
and
everybody who has aninterest in Wikipedia and analytics. Subject: [GLAM] case study with statistics: libraries & archives
should
share on Wikipedia
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"This case study examines the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of digitized historic sheet music assets made available in the
university's
Digital Media Repository. By adding links to specific items in this collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles, Ball State successfully and efficiently expanded the user base of this collection in the Digital Media Repository by vastly enhancing the
discoverability
of the collection's assets...
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from
relevant
Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40 assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection
of
149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort. The adding of links at the item level provided a plethora of highly-visible entry points to this collection's assets, raising awareness of the existence of these resources to interested Internet users who were previously unaware of these materials, as is suggested by the collection's use statistics. The success of this initiative is also remarkable in its efficiency, generating a large number of new digital patrons while requiring relatively little time to plan and execute."
Includes an encouraging graph. :-)
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
GLAM mailing list GLAM@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
Message: 3 Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 07:48:35 -0400 From: Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org To: "A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics." analytics@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: "Wikimedia & GLAM collaboration [Public]" glam@lists.wikimedia.org, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se Subject: Re: [GLAM] [Analytics] case study with statistics: libraries & archives should share on Wikipedia Message-ID: 5146FF13.7030503@wikimedia.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On 03/18/2013 07:09 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Sumana Harihareswara cited:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40 assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort.
Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed to actually benefit from an increased web audience? I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries. Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a revenue stream to them.
Lars, I shall defer to the GLAM experts, but take a look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Pageviews/GLAM . "To stimulate GLAMs to upload content to Wikimedia Commons, it is necessary to be able to communicate how many times these media files are being presented to users of Wikimedia projects. Being able to communicate these numbers helps policymakers to integrate Wikipedia into their communications policy and helps them justify contributing time and knowledge to Wikimedia projects."
-- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
GLAM mailing list GLAM@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
End of GLAM Digest, Vol 20, Issue 7
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 12:48 PM, Peter Ekman pdekman@gmail.com wrote:
In short - a straightforward reading of the 2 outside projects' write-ups is likely to lead to some problems. We should try to thrash out how to avoid these problems.
Lately in my communications with people I try to emphasize that Wikipedia isn't just an online encyclopedia, but a social network. It has developed many characteristics similar to other social networks.
I know I'm in the minority, but I strongly feel that anyone editing Wikipedia should create a username if only so that they can be communicated with.
If they don't want to create a username, then instead of jumping into edit, they should probably find who is the creator and/or recent editors of the article to which they want to add links and talk with them. This will hopefully forestall the assumption that they're spammers/vandals. It might be also the beginning of a dialogue that's useful to both Wikipedia and the institution that wants the links.
Hi Peter, I was aware of the issue you describe - not the least because it has happened quite a lot to us at Europeana! I've noted though that citations and references are more well received than external links? Is this correct?
I also get the impression it's more welcome if citations, references and links are added by a Wikipedia in Residence rather than a staff member. Note though that there's an increasing trend to take on Wikipedians in Residence as paid staff which might muddle the waters a bit in that regard.
So basically, we ourselves (i.e. our staff) have stopped adding external links to Europeana (or our partners), stopped any plans at systematic link additions and rely instead on the Wikipedia community itself to use our portal and exhibitions Cite on Wikipedia functions.
We do some limited uploads of content to Wikimedia Commons and arrange editathons around such content, but only in collaboration with Wikipedia Chapters. However, Wikimedia Commons uploads are not very effective in driving referral traffic to GLAMs and the media are used in articles in way that rarely references the institution. The latter can be de-motivating to GLAMs so I have a lot of sympathy for these suggestions, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Martsniez/attribute and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dominic/Image_citation which would, IMHO, also reinforce the cite your sources ethos of Wikipedia.
Cheers, David
--- Product Developer www.europeana.eu
Phone: +31 (0)70 3140 696 Mobile: +31 (0)64 217 2542 Email: david.haskiya@kb.nl Skype: davidhaskiya
-----Original Message----- From: glam-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:glam- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Peter Ekman Sent: maandag 18 maart 2013 17:48 To: glam@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [GLAM] The right way to add external links?
David and Sumana have passed on info from two outside projects that have added external links to Wikipedia articles and measured the results. I don't doubt the good faith of anybody here, nor the usefulness of the links, but I must note that this type of activity is almost certain to attract the attention of the hardworking (and equally good-faith) anti-spammers at WP:WikiProject SPAM. There's also a question of WP:COI involved.
As far as the attention grabbing aspect, please consider the following list from WP:WikiProject Spam of things that the anti-spammers look for: "How to identify spam and spammers
1.User is anonymous (an IP address)
User:page and/or User_talk:page are red links
No edit summary (other than, perhaps /* External links */)
User has made only one edit, which consisted of inserting a link
User has made multiple edits to related articles
The majority of user's edits are to external links sections"
There are 14 more points - but the two projects likely raised at least 3 of these red flags already.
Many Wikipedians absolutely hate spammers, and if an outside project raises these red-flags they are likely to get a bad result, just wasting their time. I do not have the complete answer of how to do this right and completely within Wikipedia rules, but I think the question needs to be raised.
Another example - just from this week. An anon apparently from the Society of Architectural Historians added a bunch of links to a new feature of their website which gives (gratis) text from their series of expensive books "Buildings of the United States". On my watchlist I saw red flags 1-3 at a glance and my first thought was spam. On closer examination, I saw it had all the attributes of spam, except that I really found the links useful. Others started deleting the links right away, and I had to take some time to defend the links. Clearly there is a problem here, which an uncritical reading of the 2 above projects would fail to address.
As I said - I don't completely know how to solve this problem, but my first reaction is that they should try to work with established Wikipedia editors.
I think I have to mention some of my recent related Wikipedia activities. I've been working on WP:Glam/smarthistory to insert external links (via the external media template) to Smarthistory's very useful and informative series of videos on art history. As far as I know, only one of these links has been deleted and there have been no complaints to the spam project, but there has been a bit of tension, simply because external links are involved. This is despite the fact that I am a completely independent editor with a long visible history of fighting against COI-editing.
In short - a straightforward reading of the 2 outside projects' write-ups is likely to lead to some problems. We should try to thrash out how to avoid these problems.
Pete Ekman User:Smallbones
Message: 2 Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:36:56 +0100 From: "David Haskiya" David.Haskiya@KB.nl To: "Wikimedia & GLAM collaboration [Public]" glam@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [GLAM] case study with statistics: libraries & archives should share on Wikipedia Message-ID: 9E81C54D7C665F4599EA05450BA9853D023888A8@goofy Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hi, You may know of it already but in case you don't.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library also published an interesting case study on the effects of citing/referencing to their authoritative sources on zoology, botany etc.:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/03/linking-to-biodiversity-heri
tage.html
Cheers, David
Product Developer www.europeana.eu
Phone: +31 (0)70 3140 696 Mobile: +31 (0)64 217 2542 Email: david.haskiya@kb.nl Skype: davidhaskiya
-----Original Message----- From: glam-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:glam- bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sumana Harihareswara Sent: zaterdag 16 maart 2013 18:32 To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities; glam@lists.wikimedia.org; A mailinglist for the Analytics Team at
WMF
and
everybody who has aninterest in Wikipedia and analytics. Subject: [GLAM] case study with statistics: libraries & archives
should
share on Wikipedia
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"This case study examines the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of digitized historic sheet music assets made available in the
university's
Digital Media Repository. By adding links to specific items in this collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles, Ball State successfully and efficiently expanded the user base of this
collection
in the Digital Media Repository by vastly enhancing the
discoverability
of the collection's assets...
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from
relevant
Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague
Sheet
Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media
Repository
was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to
40
assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the
collection
of
149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort. The adding
of
links at the item level provided a plethora of highly-visible entry points to this collection's assets, raising awareness of the
existence
of these resources to interested Internet users who were previously unaware of these materials, as is suggested by the collection's use statistics. The success of this initiative is also remarkable in
its
efficiency, generating a large number of new digital patrons while requiring relatively little time to plan and execute."
Includes an encouraging graph. :-)
Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
GLAM mailing list GLAM@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
Message: 3 Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 07:48:35 -0400 From: Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org To: "A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics." analytics@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: "Wikimedia & GLAM collaboration [Public]" glam@lists.wikimedia.org, Lars Aronsson
Subject: Re: [GLAM] [Analytics] case study with statistics:
libraries
& archives should share on WikipediaMessage-ID: 5146FF13.7030503@wikimedia.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On 03/18/2013 07:09 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Sumana Harihareswara cited:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from
relevant
Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague
Sheet
Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media
Repository
was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links
to 40
assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the
collection
of
149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort.
Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed to actually benefit from an increased web audience? I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries. Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a revenue stream to them.
Lars, I shall defer to the GLAM experts, but take a look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Pageviews/GLAM . "To
stimulate
GLAMs to upload content to Wikimedia Commons, it is necessary to be
able
to communicate how many times these media files are being presented
to
users of Wikimedia projects. Being able to communicate these numbers helps policymakers to integrate Wikipedia into their communications policy and helps them justify contributing time and knowledge to Wikimedia projects."
-- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation
GLAM mailing list GLAM@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
End of GLAM Digest, Vol 20, Issue 7
GLAM mailing list GLAM@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
Another issue that comes up with external links is how they should appear in Wikipedia.
I'm dealing with that now with the local library linking templates I announced here not that long ago. I created templates that would give links as inlined text, and a template that would give the links organized in a box.
The last of these is visually distinctive, and it's the one that everyone who's added the templates (except for a few of mine) seems to be using. I think there are some good reasons for that, given their multi-library linking functions, and the special visual demarcation that also is common practice for certain other library-related external links.
But there are arguments the other way as well, some based on reluctance to have lots of box-clutter for external links. So the continued existence of the boxes is now up for debate in Wikipedia. Since many of you on this list may well be more familiar with the Wikipedia community and issues that I, I'd be interested in your thoughts. You can find the debate to date on the Library resource box template Talk page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Library_resources_box
John