[Wiki-research-l] Fwd: Quality and pageviews

Ok - your reasoning is sound. I'm happy that the "FA of the day" won't distort the results :-) Thanks. On another note however, now is the first time I've been able to look at your link (before I was on my phone) and I must admit I have no idea what to do with it. I'm no coder so I don't know how to go from http://grey.colorado.edu/mingus/index.php/Wikipedia_Quality_Pageviews_Corre… an actual result... Can you give me a hint? -Liam wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata On 29 May 2010 16:50, Brian J Mingus &lt;Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu&gt; wrote: > I think this technique is perfectly scientific. If you sample 2000 > featured and 2000 random articles there is a 1.5% chance (30/2000) that the > featured article was on the front page last month. If you like, you can make > a list and exclude them. But the effect is very small. > > > On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Brian &lt;Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu&gt;wrote;wrote: > >> I only looked at last month so it is not sensitive to the article >> being on the front page except by chance. Looking at Good articles is not a >> good idea, you will get a very weak correlation. >> >> >> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 5:31 AM, Liam Wyatt &lt;liamwyatt(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: >> >>> Actually Brian, does your tool take account of the unusual spike in >>> pageviews that a featured article receives when it's FA of the day? I'd like >>> to be able to say that the article receives more views even without special >>> events like that. Is it possible to. Remove that day for each of the FAs >>> from the stats. Or, alternatively, can the script be run looking for Good >>> Articles rather than FAs as these don't get special publicity but are still >>> better quality than the average? >>> >>> -Liam >>> >>> >>> >>> On 29/05/2010, at 2:48, Brian J Mingus &lt;Brian.Mingus(a)Colorado.EDU&gt; >>> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Brian < &lt;Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu&gt; >>> Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu&gt; wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Liam Wyatt < &lt;liamwyatt(a)gmail.com&gt; >>>> liamwyatt(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: >>>> >>>>> Does anyone know of any research which demonstrates a correlation >>>>> between the quality of an article in Wikipedia and the number of pageviews >>>>> it receives? >>>>> I'm trying to argue, as part of my work with museums, that if they >>>>> want to get people to come to their own website from wikipedia, then instead >>>>> of focusing on adding top-level links to the "external links" section, they >>>>> should instead focus on adding deep-linked footnotes and encouraging the >>>>> improvement of the quality of the article in general. This is on the basis >>>>> that "increased quality=increased pageviews=increased clickthroughs". A >>>>> win-win situation. >>>>> >>>>> I have some very nice statistics of pageviews (from >>>>> <http://stats.grok.se>stats.grok.se) that match the clickthrough >>>>> stats from a museum (from their analytics) that clearly demonstrate a >>>>> correlation between increased pageviews and increased clickthroughs. >>>>> However, I'm still looking for some scientific data to prove the link >>>>> between improved article quality and an increase in the number of views of >>>>> that article. >>>>> >>>>> Can anyone help? >>>>> >>>>> -Liam >>>> >>>> >>>> An easy way to pull this off looks like this: >>>> >>>> - Create a list of all the featured articles >>>> - Use <http://stats.grok.se>http://stats.grok.se to count their >>>> pageviews >>>> - Generate a random list of articles >>>> - Check their pageviews >>>> - Compute correlation between pageviews / quality >>>> >>>> You can also do a slightly more detailed analysis by using the >>>> Wikipedia Editorial Team's ratings, but caveat emptor, their rating system >>>> is not satistifactory as I've shown in a couple of papers. Nonetheless, if >>>> you group together Featured/A/B articles and Start/Stub articles into two >>>> groups, the result should be solid. >>>> >>>> >>>> - DeHoust, C., Mangalath, P., Mingus., B. (2008). *Improving >>>> search in Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery*. >>>> Technical Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/6/68/DeHoustM… >>>> - Rassbach, L., Mingus., B, Blackford, T. (2007). *Exploring the >>>> feasibility of automatically rating online article quality*. >>>> Technical Report. PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/d/d3/Rassbach… >>>> >>>> >>> Liam, >>> >>> I've written you a quick bot that computes the correlation >>> coefficient between quality and pageviews for random samples of featured and >>> random articles in April. It requires Python and SciPy. You can find it >>> here: >>> >>> >>> <http://grey.colorado.edu/mingus/index.php/Wikipedia_Quality_Pageviews_Correlation_Coefficient> >>> http://grey.colorado.edu/mingus/index.php/Wikipedia_Quality_Pageviews_Corre… >>> >>> I suggest that you cross validate the result. In other words, run the >>> script several times and then average the results. It's rather slow, owing >>> to the slowness of Wikimedia properties. I personally didn't run it for more >>> than 10 featured and 10 random articles, but I set those numbers to 2000 for >>> you. It will take hours to run. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> Brian >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >> >