[WikiEN-l] Question about "External links"

[Gregory Kohs]

On 9/8/06, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am curious if there is any factual data about how many clicks per day,
on
> average, that a run-of-the-mill outbound link receives in the "External
> links" section of a typical Wikipedia article?  My guess is that it's
> somewhere around 3 or 4, but that's just me looking at it as a [[Fermi
> problem]].

+++
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 14:52:31 -0400
From: "Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell at gmail.com>

You should know, you spammed your blog on a number of pages.

If your customers are really interested in this data, perhaps you
could fund wikimedia to perform a proper study.

+++ +++
Surprise, surprise, that past mistakes would come back to haunt me.  Still,
I felt that the content so linked on my blog would be of informational use
to the community.  Being that the 3 or 4 inbound hits per day that I
received tended to spend an average of 1 to 5 minutes on the article, I
guess it actually was of some value to most people, until the links were
(appropriately) removed.  (Remember, even Jimmy Wales edited his own article
a number of times before "learning the rules".)

Anyway, you surely won't believe it, but my customers are not at all the
reason I'm asking this question.  Instead, I have a larger, more universally
interesting reason for asking; but I'm not quite ready to disclose my
agenda.  I will assure you, though, that it is in the interest of
underscoring a major "conflict of interest" problem within Wikipedia -- not
for my personal financial gain.

As for funding Wikimedia to get a legitimate answer to the question... since
I've already been a multi-time donor to Wikimedia fund drives, I would
certainly entertain that.  How much do you think it would cost to conduct
such a study?  Or, were you being facetious?

Greg