On 8/25/14, 3:06 AM, MZMcBride wrote:
As a metric, pageviews are probably not very meaningful. One way we can observe whether we're fulfilling our mission is to see how ubiquitous our content has become. An even better metric might be the quality of the articles we have. Anecdotal evidence suggests that higher article quality is not really tied to the readership rate, though perhaps article size is.
Yes, I'd ideally like some better measure of how much people get out of articles. Some types of analytics do track page view duration, although that can be considered intrusive.
I've done a little spot-checking within specific areas (e.g. archaeological sites) of our view counts, and they are largely dominated by spikes around transient news events: something is in the news and 5,000 or 50,000 people load an article that normally gets 50 or 100 hits a day. Providing that kind of quick background knowledge to people googling for an item they saw on the news is a valuable service, to be sure. But I'm not sure it's *as* big a proportion of the value Wikipedia provides as the raw pageload numbers would say.
-Mark