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
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Bob Kosovsky
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David Haskiya
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John Mark Ockerbloom
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Peter Ekman