[WikiEN-l] Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do we have any stats on how often people click the links in
> references? I suspect not. It would be good if we could get some,
> though.
>

Slightly tangential, a few days ago I was trying to figure out how
this Google News listing algorithm works and how much traffic it's
driving to us.  The most interesting thing I found was this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_state_funeral_of_Omar_Bongo

It was linked from the World News section of Google News; I noticed it
in the last few hours of 16 June UTC (and at the time it was listed,
it had only a single author and had been created that day).  According
to http://stats.grok.se/en/200906/Death_and_state_funeral_of_Omar_Bongo
, it only got 35 hits for 16 June.  The next day it got over 300 hits,
but I suspect most of these were internal hits, from the editors
discussing whether to include it on the main page for "In the news",
from the current events portal, and from [[Omar Bongo]].  I'm not sure
if the Google News link persisted into 17 June or not.

Based on what I've seen of articles with multiple links to recent news
stories, regardless of when they were created or how many people have
contributed, I suspect that inclusion in Google News is based on
traffic and/or links *from* Wikipedia to the stories Google News has
identified as a group.  I haven't seen any cases where an article was
listed with only a single link to a current news story.

It might be worthwhile to do some tests by creating articles in a
controlled manner with different numbers of links to news stories, to
get a better sense of what it takes for Google News to pick up a new
article.

-Sage (User:Ragesoss)