[Wikitech-l] Tracking external link statistics over time

I hope the following is useful to someone and I welcome feedback. I have uploaded some raw statistics data to the Internet Archive, counting the external links by Wikimedia project and target website domain. For each database dump, I produced a CSV file. For January 2008, the websites with most links from en.wikipedia can be found by "sort -nr enwiki-20080103-linkstats.csv": 1939434,en.wikipedia.org 378267,tools.wikimedia.de 294030,wikimediafoundation.org 139856,creativecommons.org 122630,imdb.com 87257,ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 73792,news.bbc.co.uk 67776,iucnredlist.org 65595,rhaworth.myby.co.uk 63236,dx.doi.org I only counted links from the main (article), File, Author, Index and Portal namespaces. I removed initial "www." from the domains, counting www.imdb.com as imdb.com. Only counts of 10 or more are included. The uploaded files are grouped by year, quarter or month: http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_2008 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_2009 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_Q1_2010 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_Q2_2010 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_Q3_2010 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_Q4_2010 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201101 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201102 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201103 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201104 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201105 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201106 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201107 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201108 http://www.archive.org/details/Wikipedia_external_links_statistics_201109 Over time, the number of links to the old and new domain of the British Museum have evolved like this: 20080103 256,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 45,britishmuseum.org 20091103 199,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 350,britishmuseum.org 20100116 194,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 396,britishmuseum.org 20100817 141,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 950,britishmuseum.org 20100904 141,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 980,britishmuseum.org 20100916 141,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1005,britishmuseum.org 20101002 141,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1034,britishmuseum.org 20101011 141,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1047,britishmuseum.org 20110115 142,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1100,britishmuseum.org 20110317 142,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1132,britishmuseum.org 20110405 142,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1138,britishmuseum.org 20110526 142,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1171,britishmuseum.org 20110620 142,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1188,britishmuseum.org 20110722 142,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1201,britishmuseum.org 20110803 141,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1213,britishmuseum.org 20110901 141,thebritishmuseum.ac.uk 1222,britishmuseum.org The fast change during Liam Wyatt's month in residence in May/June (?) of 2010 has continued at a much slower pace. Some other Wikimedia projects that have links to the old domain thebritishmuseum.ac.uk are: 10,cawiki 20,commonswiki 36,dewiki 141,enwiki 27,eswiki 20,frwiki 13,huwiki 14,itwiki 10,jawiki 13,nowiki 10,ptwiki 19,ruwiki 13,shwiki 14,svwiki 12,trwiki To find and update these links, use the [[Special:Linksearch]] page. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se