On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Brian <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > 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> > > Liam, I've written you a quick bot that computes the correlation coefficient between quality and pageviews for random samples of featured and random articles in April. It requires Python and SciPy. You can find it here: http://grey.colorado.edu/mingus/index.php/Wikipedia_Quality_Pageviews_Correlation_Coefficient I suggest that you cross validate the result. In other words, run the script several times and then average the results. It's rather slow, owing to the slowness of Wikimedia properties. I personally didn't run it for more than 10 featured and 10 random articles, but I set those numbers to 2000 for you. It will take hours to run. Cheers, Brian
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