2008/11/26 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2008/11/26 Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com:
A reader typing in "Ireland" (or an editor linking [[Ireland]]) is almost certainly thinking about the country, not the geological structure.
Can we get numbers anywhere to prove or disprove that "almost certainly"?
A suggested method for doing so, but one which unfortunately needs some hacking around:
Relink *every single internal link* to go to a subsidiary article *or* a redirect to the current one, but so that no inbound links point simply to [[Ireland]].
[[Ireland (disambiguation)]] [[Ireland (country)]] [[Ireland (island)]]
and also the various historical articles: [[Irish Free State]], [[Kingdom of Ireland]], etc. (People writing "Ireland" often mean the political entity *but* pre-1922, remember, and it's a bit confusing to have an article talking about St. Aidan travelling to the modern nation...)
Then, once nothing links directly to the offending "main title", watch wikistats for a week. See what the relative traffic figures are, and combine that with the number of inbound links to each. (The traffic just to [[Ireland]] will probably reflect incoming searches, if it can't be internal.)
I suspect we'll end up with the largest single fraction of traffic going to articles on the modern country, but not an overwhelming majority. Remember just how much history we have...
Of course, this solution is probably entirely impractical and would cause even more screaming :-)