Hoi Dario,
When you look at the statistics [1], you find that the number of page views in English is going down faster than in the other languages combined. You also find that the percentage of readers for the top ten Wikipedias in size is slowly but surely decreasing (now at
88.94%). How can we decrease this percentage even more without sacrificing the number of page views for the top 10?
I guess you saw our report on 2013 traffic trends [1], page views have been following a downward trend in 2013, but unique visitors as measured via comScore have been steadily growing over time and we have no evidence to date of a change in that trend, after controlling for seasonality. We are working with the analytics engineers to have more reliable data about traffic to be able to accurately answer these questions, including breaking down readership trends by country, project, device and source.
Has there been any research in how we can stimulate the growth in Wikipedias that are not part of the top 10%. Do we know to what extend the English Wikipedia model works for these other languages or is a hindrance. Do we know what people are looking for in the smaller Wikipedias and do we know what they do / do not find. Do we know how people find articles in those languages, does this work in the same way as it does for English? Is it possible that we have to cultivate contacts with the local “Googles" in order to grow attention for what we have to offer.
speaking for Analytics/Research & Data, we haven’t done a lot of original research let alone experimentation on small Wikipedias. I expect request logs and search logs will provide useful data to understand how people find articles on these projects.
Do we know what the effect is of the new search engine that is much better at providing results in other scripts? Do we know to what extend inter language links are created and, do we know how this has changed since the move to Wikidata? Dario, can you please tell us to what extend the other languages are studied at all? Do we know what effect they have? Do we know about the experience of these Wikipedias locally? Do we care about the typography in other scripts? Do we know about the NPOV in the small projects? Do we know about gender diversity in the smaller languages. How about cultural bias and how does this compare to the cultural bias in the big projects? Dario there is so much that we do not know, have not touched.
amen to that.
Why study more of what has been studied to death?
I am not sure I understand your question, but if you are suggesting that we need to find better ways to pitch unexplored research to the wiki research community I am down with that. It’s sad that we haven’t found a good model to create a speed dating system to match research questions and researchers, but many people on this list as well as those who served on the research committee have expressed a lot of interest in fixing this problem. Do you want to help and do you have any example of strategies that you think might be successful?
Dario