Hi Laura and Kerry,
One point to remember when comparing views of DYKs with other processes
such as GAs is that DYKs get a slot on the mainpage. In that sense they are
best compared to in the news items and the Featured Article of the Day.
Though I'm pretty sure they don't individually get as many hits as the
latter.
Longer term the things that one would expect would increase readership
would be incoming links, redirects, categories and article completeness. If
you add a section to an article covering a new aspect such as this
particular hill fort being one of the few homes of a particular orchid or
having had a WWII anti aircraft emplacement there in the forties then you
can expect to come up in relevant searches and thereby get additional hits.
Some of this is straightforward, if something has some alternative names
then making sure we have redirects for them will enable more people to find
the article.
Some is more complex. I'm not sure how far down an article the search
engines will go, but I assume that the search engines give most weight to
the first paragraph and therefore the lede and the redirects need to
contain the words that people are most likely to be searching for when they
want to find this article.
Jonathan
On 3 August 2013 17:31, Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com> wrote:
On Saturday, August 3, 2013, Kerry Raymond wrote:
Hi, Laura!
Hi Kerry. Thanks for the comments. :)
I wonder if a variable worth considering is the
number of views of the
DYK vs the average number of page views of the article(s) (per
day/week/month or whatever) promoted by the DYK *before* the publication of
the DYK (obviously this can only measured for expanded articles rather than
new ones). The hypothesis here is that more popular topics make more
popular DYKs.
This is actually one of the areas that is worth looking at further.
People have attempted to time DYKs to coincide with certain events.
TonyTheTiger is actually very good at doing this for some his hooks. It
can and sometimes does create tension in the project as people try to get
things timed for these events and not everyone wants to oblige them. (One
situation that particulary comes to mine is the Kony2012 article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012 where the article was stalled at
DYK because a reviewer did not want to time it to coincide with an already
large media blitz.) It just would require a lot of subject knowledge to
do any indepth research on this topic and looking through T:TDYK to see
where things are in the special holding areas often to identify some of
these.
Another interesting variable is number of page
views of the article in
the days/weeks/months after the DYK. It would be interesting to know the
extent to which DYKs drive additional interest in the topic both in the
short term and whether any increase in interest is sustained longer term. I
would hypothesize any initial sharp increase during the DYK, with a sharp
fall-off after the DYK finishes but with a small sustained elevation.
Yes, my casual observation has been that historically, articles get an
average page views per month bump after DYK that they do not enjoy with
other processes like GA or peer review. (This casual observation and
assumption further research would bear it out as likely fact is based on
the fact that you have rapid content development other processes do not
require, and then subsequent SEO stengthening by appearing on the front
page.) I think having looked at the articles the hypothesis is true, but
would need a great deal of additional data that you also have two mini
traffic bumps prior to appearing at DYK, with the first being from the
contributors working on the article, and the second as a result of the DYK
review.
It would also be interesting to see if articles
mentioned in DYKs show
any increased edit activity OR the creation of new inbound links to the
article in the short or long term, but I am less sure about what is the
baseline for comparison (given that a DYK article will have recently been
created or expanded, suggesting an abnormally high level of edit activity
immediately preceding the DYK). Possible proxies are articles in the same
categories?
The possible baseline would be new articles that meet DYK articles that do
not appear at DYK or conversely comparing the article's editing history in
several periods: Before DYK work, during DYK expansion, during DYK review,
the day of and the week after DYK review, and the two month period after
the DYK. (I had actually considered doing this type of research to look at
the contributions and DYK, but it would serve a completely different
purpose. Hence, it would need to be retooled. I think this could
potentially be one of the strengths of DYK that people fail to consider in
that it does give new articles of a slightly higher caliber more eyes and
potential contributors from the established editing pool than the article
would otherwise get. I would love to see someone do research on the
contribution effect of DYK, especially say if they could possibly compare
it to other processes in terms of contributor participation.
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
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