On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One thing that might be interesting to track is the
outgoing traffic
from the images to the website of the Bundesarchiv (I suppose the
credits link to them?). This might give us some insight as to what
visibility these things actually bring to the organisations involved.
<snip>
I have ~200 images on Commons, used in ~2000 wiki articles in various
languages. Those image description pages contain a link to my
website, and collectively those links generate about 2.5% of my
incoming web traffic. An additional 1% of my traffic comes from just
2 links that occur directly in enwiki pages. So, I would conclude
that reference links on Commons images are individually of low value
compared to the external links in articles. And both are largely
insignificant compared to the 75% of my traffic that originates from
search engines.
Obviously scaled up 500-fold may give the Bundesarchiv a more
impressive result, but I don't think we can count on the power of
those external links to dramatically alter people's perceptions.
-Robert Rohde