Adding a few thoughts:
* Nemo makes a good point that there have always been tons and tons of
mirrors. In my opinion, none of them have ever been anecdotally impactful
enough to warrant specific study even if many are frustrating. The degree
to which the impact of these mirrors is diffuse across all of them as
opposed to one major mirror also complicates our ability to study their
effect on readership etc. at Wikipedia. And search engines do not like
giving away raw click data so that's largely a dead-end when it comes to
understanding these sites impact unfortunately.
* *External re-use* in general (not just mirrors but any place Wikimedia
project information shows up outside of the ecosystem) is something that we
are thinking about at WMF. You can see that it's been added as a metric in
the medium term plan (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Worldwide_readership).
I see this as a nod to understanding that much of the way that Wikipedia
articles etc. are seen/heard by readers is through search engines, voice
assistants, etc. The impact of these external entities is obviously a
long-running debate and not one that has ready answers but certainly quite
important to the future of the projects.
* Personally, I am planning to start some research in the next year around
better understanding all the different places in which Wikimedia content is
re-used and what impact that has on the projects themselves -- for example,
the ability to attract new editors, how well the external content links
back to Wikipedia. Initially, much of this will be enumerating the
different ways/places in which content appears so we know what questions we
should be asking. But hopefully we begin to answer questions like how to
track this re-use, the value of Wikimedia projects to services like voice
assistants, and what sorts of external re-use is most beneficial to the
projects.

Best,
Isaac


On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 12:52 PM Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemow...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Because there are hundreds of mirrors and new ones are born or die about
> every week, it's probably worth mentioning we have some lists.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/All
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors
>
> Federico
>
> _______________________________________________
> Analytics mailing list
> Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>


-- 
Isaac Johnson -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
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