[WikiEN-l] Prizes and the British Museum and Wikipedia

[Gwern Branwen]

     "Thing is, it's fairly difficult to bring an article to
"featured" status on the English Wikipedia.  It takes a lot of time
and review to push the article candidate through the larger and
frequently melodramatic English review community.  However, on some
other less-traveled Wikipedia language versions, getting content to
the featured level is relatively easy.  So, while the museum probably
expected that its five $140 prizes would be going to articles written
in English, two of the actual winning articles were authored in
Catalan, another in Spanish, another in Latin, and only one in
English.  To give you an idea of comparative traffic statistics, the
English Wikipedia garners over 7 million page views per hour (or,
almost every person over the age of 5 in metropolitan Chicago could
each view one page).  The Latin Wikipedia captures the attention of
fewer than two thousand page views hourly (or, the population of the
town of Helper, Utah).  The winning Latin featured article about the
British Museum's Rosetta Stone artifact received only about 14 page
views a day  over the past ten days.  (Compare the traffic on the
English Wikipedia's article about the Rosetta Stone: 24,300 page views
per day.)  One of the winning articles in the Catalan language gets
only 12 page views daily.

     Imagine paying $140 to a copywriter for content that will get 12
or 14 page views per day.  It may be the British Museum's worst
pay-per-impression deal on the Internet ever."

'British Museum pays for Wikipedia page views'
http://www.examiner.com/x-58002-Wiki-Edits-Examiner~y2010m7d26-British-Museum-pays-for-Wikipedia-page-views

-- 
gwern