[WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Trouble in Ireland

[Andrew Gray]

2008/11/26 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> 2008/11/26 Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com>:
>
>> A reader typing in "Ireland" (or an editor linking [[Ireland]])
>> is almost certainly thinking about the country, not the geological
>> structure.
>
> Can we get numbers anywhere to prove or disprove that "almost certainly"?

A suggested method for doing so, but one which unfortunately needs
some hacking around:

Relink *every single internal link* to go to a subsidiary article *or*
a redirect to the current one, but so that no inbound links point
simply to [[Ireland]].

[[Ireland (disambiguation)]]
[[Ireland (country)]]
[[Ireland (island)]]

and also the various historical articles: [[Irish Free State]],
[[Kingdom of Ireland]], etc. (People writing "Ireland" often mean the
political entity *but* pre-1922, remember, and it's a bit confusing to
have an article talking about St. Aidan travelling to the modern
nation...)

Then, once nothing links directly to the offending "main title", watch
wikistats for a week. See what the relative traffic figures are, and
combine that with the number of inbound links to each. (The traffic
just to [[Ireland]] will probably reflect incoming searches, if it
can't be internal.)

I suspect we'll end up with the largest single fraction of traffic
going to articles on the modern country, but not an overwhelming
majority. Remember just how much history we have...

Of course, this solution is probably entirely impractical and would
cause even more screaming :-)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk