Hi,
I posted research about the factors that may impact English Wikipedia Did You Know article traffic on the day. Because the research is a bit long, a copy of it can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anatomy_of_English_Wikipedia_Did_You...
Summary: This research examines the traffic of 544 English Wikipedia Did You Knows to try to determine which variables play a role in the determining the number of page views an article will get on the day. It largely concludes that the number of dependent and independent variables make it to difficult to isolate specific reasons why one type of article performs better than another, though there are some general time and topics that will likely result in greater views.
Any feedback is appreciated either here, on the research talk page or privately.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
Hi, Laura!
I wonder if a variable worth considering is the number of views of the DYK vs the average number of page views of the article(s) (per day/week/month or whatever) promoted by the DYK *before* the publication of the DYK (obviously this can only measured for expanded articles rather than new ones). The hypothesis here is that more popular topics make more popular DYKs.
Another interesting variable is number of page views of the article in the days/weeks/months after the DYK. It would be interesting to know the extent to which DYKs drive additional interest in the topic both in the short term and whether any increase in interest is sustained longer term. I would hypothesize any initial sharp increase during the DYK, with a sharp fall-off after the DYK finishes but with a small sustained elevation.
It would also be interesting to see if articles mentioned in DYKs show any increased edit activity OR the creation of new inbound links to the article in the short or long term, but I am less sure about what is the baseline for comparison (given that a DYK article will have recently been created or expanded, suggesting an abnormally high level of edit activity immediately preceding the DYK). Possible proxies are articles in the same categories?
Kerry
Sent from my iPad
On 03/08/2013, at 6:04 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
Hi,
I posted research about the factors that may impact English Wikipedia Did You Know article traffic on the day. Because the research is a bit long, a copy of it can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anatomy_of_English_Wikipedia_Did_You...
Summary: This research examines the traffic of 544 English Wikipedia Did You Knows to try to determine which variables play a role in the determining the number of page views an article will get on the day. It largely concludes that the number of dependent and independent variables make it to difficult to isolate specific reasons why one type of article performs better than another, though there are some general time and topics that will likely result in greater views.
Any feedback is appreciated either here, on the research talk page or privately.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
-- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Saturday, August 3, 2013, Kerry Raymond wrote:
Hi, Laura!
Hi Kerry. Thanks for the comments. :)
I wonder if a variable worth considering is the number of views of the DYK vs the average number of page views of the article(s) (per day/week/month or whatever) promoted by the DYK *before* the publication of the DYK (obviously this can only measured for expanded articles rather than new ones). The hypothesis here is that more popular topics make more popular DYKs.
This is actually one of the areas that is worth looking at further. People have attempted to time DYKs to coincide with certain events. TonyTheTiger is actually very good at doing this for some his hooks. It can and sometimes does create tension in the project as people try to get things timed for these events and not everyone wants to oblige them. (One situation that particulary comes to mine is the Kony2012 article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012 where the article was stalled at DYK because a reviewer did not want to time it to coincide with an already large media blitz.) It just would require a lot of subject knowledge to do any indepth research on this topic and looking through T:TDYK to see where things are in the special holding areas often to identify some of these.
Another interesting variable is number of page views of the article in the days/weeks/months after the DYK. It would be interesting to know the extent to which DYKs drive additional interest in the topic both in the short term and whether any increase in interest is sustained longer term. I would hypothesize any initial sharp increase during the DYK, with a sharp fall-off after the DYK finishes but with a small sustained elevation.
Yes, my casual observation has been that historically, articles get an average page views per month bump after DYK that they do not enjoy with other processes like GA or peer review. (This casual observation and assumption further research would bear it out as likely fact is based on the fact that you have rapid content development other processes do not require, and then subsequent SEO stengthening by appearing on the front page.) I think having looked at the articles the hypothesis is true, but would need a great deal of additional data that you also have two mini traffic bumps prior to appearing at DYK, with the first being from the contributors working on the article, and the second as a result of the DYK review.
It would also be interesting to see if articles mentioned in DYKs show any increased edit activity OR the creation of new inbound links to the article in the short or long term, but I am less sure about what is the baseline for comparison (given that a DYK article will have recently been created or expanded, suggesting an abnormally high level of edit activity immediately preceding the DYK). Possible proxies are articles in the same categories?
The possible baseline would be new articles that meet DYK articles that do not appear at DYK or conversely comparing the article's editing history in several periods: Before DYK work, during DYK expansion, during DYK review, the day of and the week after DYK review, and the two month period after the DYK. (I had actually considered doing this type of research to look at the contributions and DYK, but it would serve a completely different purpose. Hence, it would need to be retooled. I think this could potentially be one of the strengths of DYK that people fail to consider in that it does give new articles of a slightly higher caliber more eyes and potential contributors from the established editing pool than the article would otherwise get. I would love to see someone do research on the contribution effect of DYK, especially say if they could possibly compare it to other processes in terms of contributor participation.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
Hi Laura and Kerry,
One point to remember when comparing views of DYKs with other processes such as GAs is that DYKs get a slot on the mainpage. In that sense they are best compared to in the news items and the Featured Article of the Day. Though I'm pretty sure they don't individually get as many hits as the latter.
Longer term the things that one would expect would increase readership would be incoming links, redirects, categories and article completeness. If you add a section to an article covering a new aspect such as this particular hill fort being one of the few homes of a particular orchid or having had a WWII anti aircraft emplacement there in the forties then you can expect to come up in relevant searches and thereby get additional hits.
Some of this is straightforward, if something has some alternative names then making sure we have redirects for them will enable more people to find the article.
Some is more complex. I'm not sure how far down an article the search engines will go, but I assume that the search engines give most weight to the first paragraph and therefore the lede and the redirects need to contain the words that people are most likely to be searching for when they want to find this article.
Jonathan
On 3 August 2013 17:31, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
On Saturday, August 3, 2013, Kerry Raymond wrote:
Hi, Laura!
Hi Kerry. Thanks for the comments. :)
I wonder if a variable worth considering is the number of views of the DYK vs the average number of page views of the article(s) (per day/week/month or whatever) promoted by the DYK *before* the publication of the DYK (obviously this can only measured for expanded articles rather than new ones). The hypothesis here is that more popular topics make more popular DYKs.
This is actually one of the areas that is worth looking at further. People have attempted to time DYKs to coincide with certain events. TonyTheTiger is actually very good at doing this for some his hooks. It can and sometimes does create tension in the project as people try to get things timed for these events and not everyone wants to oblige them. (One situation that particulary comes to mine is the Kony2012 article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012 where the article was stalled at DYK because a reviewer did not want to time it to coincide with an already large media blitz.) It just would require a lot of subject knowledge to do any indepth research on this topic and looking through T:TDYK to see where things are in the special holding areas often to identify some of these.
Another interesting variable is number of page views of the article in the days/weeks/months after the DYK. It would be interesting to know the extent to which DYKs drive additional interest in the topic both in the short term and whether any increase in interest is sustained longer term. I would hypothesize any initial sharp increase during the DYK, with a sharp fall-off after the DYK finishes but with a small sustained elevation.
Yes, my casual observation has been that historically, articles get an average page views per month bump after DYK that they do not enjoy with other processes like GA or peer review. (This casual observation and assumption further research would bear it out as likely fact is based on the fact that you have rapid content development other processes do not require, and then subsequent SEO stengthening by appearing on the front page.) I think having looked at the articles the hypothesis is true, but would need a great deal of additional data that you also have two mini traffic bumps prior to appearing at DYK, with the first being from the contributors working on the article, and the second as a result of the DYK review.
It would also be interesting to see if articles mentioned in DYKs show any increased edit activity OR the creation of new inbound links to the article in the short or long term, but I am less sure about what is the baseline for comparison (given that a DYK article will have recently been created or expanded, suggesting an abnormally high level of edit activity immediately preceding the DYK). Possible proxies are articles in the same categories?
The possible baseline would be new articles that meet DYK articles that do not appear at DYK or conversely comparing the article's editing history in several periods: Before DYK work, during DYK expansion, during DYK review, the day of and the week after DYK review, and the two month period after the DYK. (I had actually considered doing this type of research to look at the contributions and DYK, but it would serve a completely different purpose. Hence, it would need to be retooled. I think this could potentially be one of the strengths of DYK that people fail to consider in that it does give new articles of a slightly higher caliber more eyes and potential contributors from the established editing pool than the article would otherwise get. I would love to see someone do research on the contribution effect of DYK, especially say if they could possibly compare it to other processes in terms of contributor participation.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
--
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Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
I agree it may be difficult to disentangle the impact of having a DYK and the impact of having a new/expanded article. However if one can view the access logs (I am told there is about 3 months worth available), I think you could tell from the referrer whether the access to the article is coming from the homepage (and anywhere else that DYKs are listed) or elsewhere. So, in theory, it's easy enough to tell which page accesses are coming as a direct result of the DYK. But it's harder to tell what long-term accesses are an indirect result of the DYK as opposed to the normal impacts of a new/expanded article. I think you'd have to do some kind of paired experiment using articles that were DYKed and another "similar" article that had the same amount of new/expanded development in the same time frame but wasn't DYKed. I don't know the likelihood of such article pairs naturally occurring. It might be that the experiment would have to create its own pairs, e.g. two members of the same rowing team with articles of the same length and general content, one DYKed and one not.
Kerry
_____
From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of WereSpielChequers Sent: Sunday, 4 August 2013 9:31 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Cc: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research:Anatomy of English Wikipedia Did You Know traffic
Hi Laura and Kerry,
One point to remember when comparing views of DYKs with other processes such as GAs is that DYKs get a slot on the mainpage. In that sense they are best compared to in the news items and the Featured Article of the Day. Though I'm pretty sure they don't individually get as many hits as the latter.
Longer term the things that one would expect would increase readership would be incoming links, redirects, categories and article completeness. If you add a section to an article covering a new aspect such as this particular hill fort being one of the few homes of a particular orchid or having had a WWII anti aircraft emplacement there in the forties then you can expect to come up in relevant searches and thereby get additional hits.
Some of this is straightforward, if something has some alternative names then making sure we have redirects for them will enable more people to find the article.
Some is more complex. I'm not sure how far down an article the search engines will go, but I assume that the search engines give most weight to the first paragraph and therefore the lede and the redirects need to contain the words that people are most likely to be searching for when they want to find this article.
Jonathan
On 3 August 2013 17:31, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
On Saturday, August 3, 2013, Kerry Raymond wrote:
Hi, Laura!
Hi Kerry. Thanks for the comments. :)
I wonder if a variable worth considering is the number of views of the DYK vs the average number of page views of the article(s) (per day/week/month or whatever) promoted by the DYK *before* the publication of the DYK (obviously this can only measured for expanded articles rather than new ones). The hypothesis here is that more popular topics make more popular DYKs.
This is actually one of the areas that is worth looking at further. People have attempted to time DYKs to coincide with certain events. TonyTheTiger is actually very good at doing this for some his hooks. It can and sometimes does create tension in the project as people try to get things timed for these events and not everyone wants to oblige them. (One situation that particulary comes to mine is the Kony2012 article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012 where the article was stalled at DYK because a reviewer did not want to time it to coincide with an already large media blitz.) It just would require a lot of subject knowledge to do any indepth research on this topic and looking through T:TDYK to see where things are in the special holding areas often to identify some of these.
Another interesting variable is number of page views of the article in the days/weeks/months after the DYK. It would be interesting to know the extent to which DYKs drive additional interest in the topic both in the short term and whether any increase in interest is sustained longer term. I would hypothesize any initial sharp increase during the DYK, with a sharp fall-off after the DYK finishes but with a small sustained elevation.
Yes, my casual observation has been that historically, articles get an average page views per month bump after DYK that they do not enjoy with other processes like GA or peer review. (This casual observation and assumption further research would bear it out as likely fact is based on the fact that you have rapid content development other processes do not require, and then subsequent SEO stengthening by appearing on the front page.) I think having looked at the articles the hypothesis is true, but would need a great deal of additional data that you also have two mini traffic bumps prior to appearing at DYK, with the first being from the contributors working on the article, and the second as a result of the DYK review.
It would also be interesting to see if articles mentioned in DYKs show any increased edit activity OR the creation of new inbound links to the article in the short or long term, but I am less sure about what is the baseline for comparison (given that a DYK article will have recently been created or expanded, suggesting an abnormally high level of edit activity immediately preceding the DYK). Possible proxies are articles in the same categories?
The possible baseline would be new articles that meet DYK articles that do not appear at DYK or conversely comparing the article's editing history in several periods: Before DYK work, during DYK expansion, during DYK review, the day of and the week after DYK review, and the two month period after the DYK. (I had actually considered doing this type of research to look at the contributions and DYK, but it would serve a completely different purpose. Hence, it would need to be retooled. I think this could potentially be one of the strengths of DYK that people fail to consider in that it does give new articles of a slightly higher caliber more eyes and potential contributors from the established editing pool than the article would otherwise get. I would love to see someone do research on the contribution effect of DYK, especially say if they could possibly compare it to other processes in terms of contributor participation.
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org