2012/4/25 Strainu <strainu10@gmail.com>
Hi,

Are there any statistics about the number of visitors that go from
Wikipedia to different websites linked with external links?

Hi;

I don't think so. If you ask for them, perhaps you can get a random anonymized sample.

We've
recently seen some people adding external links (as references) to
articles from different newspapers and I was wondering if it's really
worth it for the newspaper to have someone add such links?

 
This paper[1] discuss a project to add links to Wikipedia and you can see the results and how it improved visits.

Wikipedia uses nofollow, so adding links to your website doesn't increase your pagerank, but it works fine for reaching new readers.

Theses sites[2] receive a lot of traffic from Wikipedia, for sure.

Regards,
emijrp

(Forwarding to the research mailing list.)

[1] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/lally/05lally.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/External_Links_Ranking

--
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT | StatMediaWiki | WikiEvidens | WikiPapers | WikiTeam
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/