On 9/8/06, Gregory Kohs thekohser@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@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