[Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] Summary of findings from WMF Summer of Research program now available

[Andrew Gray]

On 8 September 2011 10:58, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:

> From what I see, the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WantedPages
> is just misleading: For instance, one of the most ranking missing articles,
> [[Alison Campbell]], has all 5000+ links leading not from other articles,
> but from article talk pages, where it is not explicitly present, which
> means someone put this red link into one of the highly used templates for
> project evaluations (I did not investigate which one). I actually doubt
> that the person is even notable, though there is a short stub in Dutch
> Wikipedia. There is no way that this is really one of the most wanted
> articles. Others I tried from the first page share the same problem.

It's in a project-specific to-do list - for a fairly minor project, as
these things go, but even a smallish project on enwiki has a lot of
articles!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Northern_Ireland_tasks

(If anyone's wondering, Alison Clarke is the former Miss Northern
Ireland, engaged to marry a prominent sportsman, and thus presumably
something of a minor local celebrity. I make no comment on
notability.)

For future research on redlinks, it would definitely be worth
distinguishing between "links in article text" and "links from
projectspace / inline templates". Technically more difficult to figure
out, of course, but that's why we call them researchers ;-)

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