On 9/8/06, Gregory Kohs <thekohser(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I am curious if there is any factual data about how many clicks per day,
on
> average, that a run-of-the-mill outbound link receives in the "External
> links" section of a typical Wikipedia article? My guess is that it's
> somewhere around 3 or 4, but that's just me looking at it as a [[Fermi
> problem]].
+++
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 14:52:31 -0400
From: "Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>
You should know, you spammed your blog on a number of pages.
If your customers are really interested in this data, perhaps you
could fund wikimedia to perform a proper study.
+++ +++
Surprise, surprise, that past mistakes would come back to haunt me. Still,
I felt that the content so linked on my blog would be of informational use
to the community. Being that the 3 or 4 inbound hits per day that I
received tended to spend an average of 1 to 5 minutes on the article, I
guess it actually was of some value to most people, until the links were
(appropriately) removed. (Remember, even Jimmy Wales edited his own article
a number of times before "learning the rules".)
Anyway, you surely won't believe it, but my customers are not at all the
reason I'm asking this question. Instead, I have a larger, more universally
interesting reason for asking; but I'm not quite ready to disclose my
agenda. I will assure you, though, that it is in the interest of
underscoring a major "conflict of interest" problem within Wikipedia -- not
for my personal financial gain.
As for funding Wikimedia to get a legitimate answer to the question... since
I've already been a multi-time donor to Wikimedia fund drives, I would
certainly entertain that. How much do you think it would cost to conduct
such a study? Or, were you being facetious?
Greg