Re: [Wikitech-l] External link tracking

[Leonard Wallentin]

> > 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?
> >
> 
> That's more or less how I see it, too. But still, there are such users
> [1]. I'm estimating that about 50% of her links remain after cleanup.
> I don't want to be mean, but she will probably be blocked sooner or
> later for those activities (because most user still see this as
> linkspam). So it must be worth *something* to the newspaper, right?


Thank you for sharing those stats, Lars. Most interesting. 
We had the same thing happening at Swedish Wikipedia as Strainu describes here, 
from one of Swedens largets newspapers. Most of the edits were reverted, and 
the only lasting outcome was a lot of badwill for the newpaper among the 
community, so I think that was not a very well thought out strategy.
/Leo Wallentin
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Re: [Wikitech-l] External link tracking

[Strainu]

În data de 25 aprilie 2012, 18:50, emijrp  a scris:
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/External_Links_Ranking

Thanks for that, it's pretty interesting (especially the sql file)!

În data de 25 aprilie 2012, 19:47, Lars Aronsson  a scris:
> 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.)

One could also imagine an AJAX solution to this, I believe. But yes,
except for my present curiosity, I also prefer not being tracked.

>
> 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?
>

That's more or less how I see it, too. But still, there are such users
[1]. I'm estimating that about 50% of her links remain after cleanup.
I don't want to be mean, but she will probably be blocked sooner or
later for those activities (because most user still see this as
linkspam). So it must be worth *something* to the newspaper, right?

Strainu

[1] https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contribu%C8%9Bii/Ioana1005

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Re: [Wikitech-l] External link tracking

[Lars Aronsson]

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 (l...@aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/



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Re: [Wikitech-l] External link tracking

[emijrp]

2012/4/25 Strainu 

> Hi,
>
> Are there any statistics about the number of visitors that go from
> Wikipedia to different websites linked with external links?


Hi;

I don't think so. If you ask for them, perhaps you can get a random
anonymized sample.

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?
>
>
This paper[1] discuss a project to add links to Wikipedia and you can see
the results and how it improved visits.

Wikipedia uses nofollow, so adding links to your website doesn't increase
your pagerank, but it works fine for reaching new readers.

Theses sites[2] receive a lot of traffic from Wikipedia, for sure.

Regards,
emijrp

(Forwarding to the research mailing list.)

[1] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/lally/05lally.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Emijrp/External_Links_Ranking

-- 
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT  |
StatMediaWiki
| WikiEvidens  |
WikiPapers
| WikiTeam 
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
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Re: [Wikitech-l] External link tracking

[Strainu]

În data de 25 aprilie 2012, 17:21, Strainu  a scris:
> Hi,
>
> 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?
>
> Thanks,
>  Strainu

P.S. The links are mostly relevant and don't get deleted, which is a
significant different from plain linkspam.

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[Wikitech-l] External link tracking

[Strainu]

Hi,

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?

Thanks,
  Strainu

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