[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[gwern0 at gmail.com]

On 2008.03.10 12:30:20 -0600, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> scribbled 1.5K characters:
> I have to be honest about one thing related to this topic. I have always
> thought it would be harmless to include Google ads on Wikipedia's internal
> search engine. There is such a small amount of content there - titles, not
> even snippets - that it seems impossible that it could be perceived as a
> tacit endorsement of any topic or a compromise of our values. An explicit
> and obvious notice could explain as much. The money raised could be used to
> further our goals, to spread knowledge throughout the world.
>
> We now know exactly how many page views Special:Search is getting. If you
> haven't seen this number yet, close your eyes and make a guess as to how
> many page views it got this
> February<http://stats.grok.se/en/200802/Special:Search>.
>
> Here's the answer:* Four hundred and seventy one million. *It was viewed 290
> million times in December, 466 million times in January, and it's already
> been viewed 100+ million times this month.
...

I find this quite sobering from a non-advertising perspective.

Is en's coverage in terms of redirects, disambiguation pages, and articles *that* bad? I can't think of any other justification for hundreds of millions of pageviews of Special:Search, unless perhaps this tool is massively overcounting - perhaps it is counting pageviews which gets immediately redirected (before any human sees anything) to an actual article?

--
gwern
grove SGI E.O.D. Evaluation Wackenhut Keyhole Defcon Ft. Keyhole COCOT
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