On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Liam Wyatt <[email protected]> wrote:

> Does anyone know of any research which demonstrates a correlation between
> the quality of an article in Wikipedia and the number of pageviews it
> receives?
> I'm trying to argue, as part of my work with museums, that if they want to
> get people to come to their own website from wikipedia, then instead of
> focusing on adding top-level links to the "external links" section, they
> should instead focus on adding deep-linked footnotes and encouraging the
> improvement of the quality of the article in general. This is on the basis
> that "increased quality=increased pageviews=increased clickthroughs". A
> win-win situation.
>
> I have some very nice statistics of pageviews (from stats.grok.se) that
> match the clickthrough stats from a museum (from their analytics) that
> clearly demonstrate a correlation between increased pageviews and increased
> clickthroughs. However, I'm still looking for some scientific data to prove
> the link between improved article quality and an increase in the number of
> views of that article.
>
> Can anyone help?
>
> -Liam


An easy way to pull this off looks like this:

- Create a list of all the featured articles
- Use http://stats.grok.se to count their pageviews
- Generate a random list of articles
- Check their pageviews
- Compute correlation between pageviews / quality

You can also do a slightly more detailed analysis by using the Wikipedia
Editorial Team's ratings, but caveat emptor, their rating system is not
satistifactory as I've shown in a couple of papers. Nonetheless, if you
group together Featured/A/B articles and Start/Stub articles into two
groups, the result should be solid.


   - DeHoust, C., Mangalath, P., Mingus., B. (2008). *Improving search in
   Wikipedia through quality and concept discovery*. Technical Report.
PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/6/68/DeHoustMangalathMingus08.pdf>
   - Rassbach, L., Mingus., B, Blackford, T. (2007). *Exploring the
   feasibility of automatically rating online article quality*. Technical
   Report. 
PDF<http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/d/d3/RassbachPincockMingus07.pdf>
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