There's a question being discussed on wikien-l at present about
whether [[en:Ireland]] should be the country, the island or a
disambig.
The arguments are both on correctness and on reader expectation. The
first is for Manual of Style wonks (as well as anyone with an
opinion), but the second is theoretically numerically ascertainable.
The question is:
* how to get numbers on how readers travel from one page to another
within Wikipedia
* without risking a privacy violation.
Examples of the latter would be if we included jumps to or from a user
page or even a WP: pseudo-pagespace page. So let's ignore those.
The first idea that springs to my mind is logging referers for article
pages, if the referer is an article page on the same Wikipedia or
[[Special:Search]].
1. Is this technically feasible given our logging structure?
2. Is there a privacy gotcha I'm ignoring?
The huge benefit from this would be seeing how readers actually use
Wikipedia, which would give us solid reasons to put given pages,
links, redirects, etc. somewhere.
This should of course include jumps from [[Special:Search]], so we
know what the heck people are actually searching for!
I realise our current logging of pretty much every page view without
crippling the servers is a miracle of computer system administration.
How feasible is my idea?
- d.