On 11/7/10, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
On 6 Nov 2010, at 20:54, MZMcBride wrote:
Liam Wyatt wrote:
Whilst I don't support or advocate for Wikimedia projects including advertising, I would like to ask a hypothetical question. Would people's opinions towards ads would be different if google's ads were to be incorporated ONLY on the Search page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search in the whitespace on the right.
This is by far the most popular individual page http://wikistics.falsikon.de/2009/wikipedia/en/ and ads there would be able to be served in a way that is both relevant to the end-user (based on the term being searched for) and yet without having to "sell out" our article pages. On the other hand it would mean we could no longer say "we have zero ads" and it would create a lot of angry Wikimedians (possibly me included) making the "slippery slope" argument.
Careful there.
A lot of people (and scripts) go through "Special:Search" because it follows links much better. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=mw:MediaWiki works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mw:MediaWiki doesn't work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=wikia:un:UN:N works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikia:un:UN:N doesn't work
As far as I'm aware, this is the only reliable way currently (and for the past few years) to resolve interwiki prefixes in an automated and accurate way. I can't say for sure, but I have a strong feeling that this is the reason that "Special:Search" gets so many hits.
Erm... how many people actually know what an interwiki is? I doubt it's a significant number. Combine that with how many people would think about of that particular usage of Special:Search, and I suspect that you're talking very small numbers. Certainly, I've never thought of that in ~ 5 years of using Wikipedia.
If Special:Search is being used in automation (and it is; it is a page generator in pywikipediabot), a few people can really bugger up the stats and any assumptions based on them.
-- John Vandenberg