On 04/25/2012 04:21 PM, Strainu wrote:
Are there any statistics about the number of visitors
that go from
Wikipedia to different websites linked with external links? We've
recently seen some people adding external links (as references) to
articles from different newspapers and I was wondering if it's really
worth it for the newspaper to have someone add such links?
When a reader is looking at a Wikipedia article, and clicks one
of the external links, there is (as far as I know) no traffic that
goes to the Wikimedia servers to indicate this. The only thing
that happens is that the web browser makes a request to the
external site. But in that request, the address of the Wikipedia
article is given as a "referer". You would have to ask each
external site how much traffic they receive with Wikipedia as
a referer. (Facebook and some other websites embed external links
in a tracker syntax, that makes a call back to their own site
before redirecting the browser to the external site. This makes
it possible for them to know how external links are followed.
But I think most people are happy that WMF refrains from this.)
I'm running
runeberg.org, which happens to be the external
website with more links from the Swedish Wikipedia than any
other. On a typical day, yesterday April 24, my site had 42,000
page views (robot crawlers not included) from 7800 different IP
addresses, and 902 of them had Wikipedia as a referer, namely
732 *different* Wikipedia pages.
Here's one example, at 9:26 AM, one iPhone user got from
http://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedjebackens_Valsverks_AB
(an article about a steelwork) to
http://runeberg.org/steelswe/0114.html
(page 46 of the book "Iron and Steel in Sweden" from 1920).
That book was scanned in 2004, the article created in 2005,
and the link was added to Wikipedia in 2006.
Was this "worth it"? I certainly didn't make any money from it,
and I didn't pay the people who put all those links in Wikipedia.
I think it would be very hard to do this on a commercial basis.
It takes time to add links to Wikipedia, not just the 30 seconds
to edit the page, but perhaps 30 minutes to find the relevant
article and the relevant webpage to link to. Can you speed up
that process, without getting questions about link spamming?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature -
http://runeberg.org/