[Foundation-l] clicking on links

[teun spaans]

Glad someone brings this up.

There are some longstanding questions that I have about wiki(p/m)edia usage
by NON-wiki(p/m)edians (called wikipedians from here on).
I regard a wikipedian as someone who is registered and logged in, and a
non-wikipedian as someone who is not logged in.
That is a choice, something can be said to regard people who are registered
and logged in but never edited anything as non wikipedians, but the
definition above is a bit simpler.

Some questions:
- Where do they non-wikipedians from? Google, favourites/bookmarks?
- How do search? Do they use the search box, or do they arrive from google
and use google for their search?
- Do non-wikipedians use the search box or do they use out internal
hyperlinks?
- How many pages do they visit on average before they find what they are
looking for? And what is the spread?
- Do they use categories for navigation? Or are categories just a hobby or
tool of wikipedians? If they use the categories for navigation, to what
extend?
- Do non wikipedians use the interlanguage links, and to what extend?
- and no doubt others will be able to contribute even more questions.

Non-wikipedians in a sense are our "customers", and to make wikipedia as
useful as possible, i believe we should learn about their behaviour on
wikipedia.

live long and prosper
teun spaans



On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 9:20 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigins.htm
>
> Well, if I'm interpreting this correctly, then nearly 90% of our hits
> come from people following internal links, so somebody must be
> clicking on them! However, you do make a good point: we have done
> studies watching how people edit, we haven't done any (to the best of
> my knowledge) watching how they read. Perhaps we should.
>
> On 20 April 2010 20:11, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>
> wrote:
> > There was lately a lot of research about making Wikipedia's usability
> better
> > for editing.
> >
> > Is there any research about the way in which Wikipedia's Actual Readers
> use
> > hyperlinks in Wikipedia, both internal and external?
> >
> > I am wondering about it, because you know, we have Manual of Style for
> > internal and external links, essays about the pros and cons of red links,
> > bots that remove over-linking etc. - yet time after time i meet Actual
> > Readers that tell me that they didn't understand a word in an article,
> even
> > though this word was linked to a good article that explained its meaning.
> > But they didn't click it and because of that they gave up on
> understanding
> > the whole article.
> >
> > If One Stupid Reader would tell me such a thing, i wouldn't mind, but
> Many
> > Clever Readers told me that. Did anyone try to think about it deeply?
> >
> > --
> > אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> > Amir Elisha Aharoni
> >
> > http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> >
> > "We're living in pieces,
> > I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
> > _______________________________________________
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> > foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
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