I wondering if Google would be willing to share that sort of data with us? That would be useful for certain languages definitely.
J
On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 12:48 PM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
At Wikimania in Gdansk someone from Google gave an interesting if somewhat controversial presentation on search improvements this way.
From my memory of the presentation - it was a few years ago; For several languages including some Indic ones, I think Bangla and Telegu, Google had listed the 500 most common search terms that didn't have a Wikipedia article.
They had then paid some translators to translate articles from English into those languages.
This had become controversial because it resulted in a number of articles on Hollywood film stars, and at least one of the editors in those wikis didn't think that people who spoke his language were interested in Hollywood filmstars. Also the people writing those articles didn't behave as if cooperating with the community was part of their remit. One language, it may have been Bangla, actually blocked the translators.
But logically the less complete a Wikipedia the more likely it is to have search terms that we could create articles for.
I could even buy the idea that few of the unsuccessful searches on English have an obvious article.
But for smaller Wikipedias this would be a useful tool to promote growth and to be more reader focussed.
If the list was only made available as a deleted list so only admins could read it then that should resolve the issues of some searches being terms we wouldn't want to publicly list.
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