http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/technology/internet/10link.htm
Not sure if this made the rounds already but thought I'd mention it.
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 5:06 AM, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/technology/internet/10link.htm
Not sure if this made the rounds already but thought I'd mention it.
Nice article. Thanks.
I particularly liked the point where it compared the number of hits on news sites to the number of hits on Wikipedia. For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia was acting as a news site, at least for those pages about events in the news.
Pity the article didn't mention Wikinews. Anyone know how good the coverage of the election was on Wikinews?
Carcharoth
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 11:42 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.comwrote:
Anyone know how good the coverage of the election was on Wikinews?
A brief scan of the Main Page on Wikinews gives at least two articles: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/World_leaders_react_to_Obama%27s_victory and http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_elected_44th_President_of_the_Unite...
I've unfortunately been too busy to be active there (I became more active over there after I was recommended by Brianmc at Wikimania in the summer), but hope to be again some time.
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Al Tally majorly.wiki@googlemail.comwrote:
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 11:42 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp@googlemail.com
wrote:
Anyone know how good the coverage of the election was on Wikinews?
A brief scan of the Main Page on Wikinews gives at least two articles: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/World_leaders_react_to_Obama%27s_victory and
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_elected_44th_President_of_the_Unite...
<snip>
Thanks. Should wikinews have tried to do more, or is that about what should be expected? I guess what I'm asking is how the coverage would be expected to differ between Wikipedia and Wikinews, and whether that is what actually happened?
Oh, and on the latter article, right next to Obama's name, is:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Image:Symbol_confirmed.svg
Hilarious. Almost as good as the "citation needed" cartoon.
Carcharoth
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.comwrote:
Thanks. Should wikinews have tried to do more, or is that about what should be expected? I guess what I'm asking is how the coverage would be expected to differ between Wikipedia and Wikinews, and whether that is what actually happened?
Wikinews has way fewer active editors than Wikipedia, so yes, it's about as good as expected.
2008/11/10 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
I particularly liked the point where it compared the number of hits on news sites to the number of hits on Wikipedia.
I ran some more detailed statistics on this at the weekend, incidentally - I'll try and post them tonight. Long post, though...
Obama's article was getting about 50% more hits than McCain's, with Palin somewhere in the middle of the two (!). Interestingly, there was a *proportionally* higher hitrate on Obama's policies article than there was on McCains (though both were getting pleasingly high rates for daughter articles)
2008/11/10 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/11/10 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
I particularly liked the point where it compared the number of hits on news sites to the number of hits on Wikipedia.
I ran some more detailed statistics on this at the weekend, incidentally - I'll try and post them tonight. Long post, though...
Obama's article was getting about 50% more hits than McCain's, with Palin somewhere in the middle of the two (!). Interestingly, there was a *proportionally* higher hitrate on Obama's policies article than there was on McCains (though both were getting pleasingly high rates for daughter articles)
Okay, here's some notes - I posted them to the wiki rather than here in order not to dump a huge load of text on the list. Also, there's a graph!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shimgray/Election_statistics
Comments to the usual address - if I get the chance over the next week I'll expand it and try to figure out another way of looking at the data. The stuff with daughter articles is quite promising, and it'd be interesting to compare this to some "normal" biographies with that many daughter pages...
2008/11/11 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
Okay, here's some notes - I posted them to the wiki rather than here in order not to dump a huge load of text on the list. Also, there's a graph!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shimgray/Election_statistics
I've updated this to include redirects, which was pretty educational - a lot of traffic comes through them, as high as 20%.
During October, 5% of *all* readers looking at the Obama page were doing so using a redirect which had a misspelled version of his name. Given that virtually all of our internal links have the correct name, this implies a much higher proportion of those who searched for it will have ended up on these pages... so what proportion of our visitors simply can't spell it? I wonder if anyone asked that question in one of the tens of thousands of polls over the past few months :-)
2008/11/11 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/11/11 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
Okay, here's some notes - I posted them to the wiki rather than here in order not to dump a huge load of text on the list. Also, there's a graph!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shimgray/Election_statistics
I've updated this to include redirects, which was pretty educational - a lot of traffic comes through them, as high as 20%.
During October, 5% of *all* readers looking at the Obama page were doing so using a redirect which had a misspelled version of his name. Given that virtually all of our internal links have the correct name, this implies a much higher proportion of those who searched for it will have ended up on these pages... so what proportion of our visitors simply can't spell it? I wonder if anyone asked that question in one of the tens of thousands of polls over the past few months :-)
And *that* is why no-one ever wins as a write-in candidate. ;)