Hi Huji,
On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 at 05:36, Huji Lee huji.huji@gmail.com wrote:
Lastly, analysis of data from fawiki's main page (which gets ~50K views a day) shows that taking something to the main page only increases its daily page views by about a few hundred times a day.
There's room for misinterpretation of the phrase "... its daily page views by about a few hundred times a day ...". It could be read in the following ways:
1. "... its daily page view increases by a few 100x ..." which means that if the current page view is 10000 then putting a link in the main page leads to a page view of 1000000 (this is a significant increase!). 2. "... its daily page view increases by a few 100 views ..." which means that if the current page view is 10000 then putting a link in the main page leads to a page view of 10100 (not so significant).
I believe you meant the second one.
Those pages are topic of the day (like COVID-19 pages right now) will get most of their viewership through other mechanisms, mainly Google searches. To assume that Wikipedia's "main page" is the starting page for a large group of users, or when they go to find new information, seems to be inaccurate. Spending time on improving those articles and letting search engines guide the readers to those articles seems to be a better use of time.
FWIW, as a person who just follows the Wikipedia communities from the outside, I would say that your POV seems to be valid. Focusing on content and letting the search engines do the rest is a valid claim.
That said, I also believe that it's a good idea to have a links to COVID related articles in the main page for several reasons. It aids better reach (definitely what we want). It's aids quick access to the related articles. As it's curated, it's more likely to point to the top articles related to the epidemic and very less likely to point to spam articles that might spring up at these times. Just my opinion.
-- Sivaraam