On 29 May 2010 01:48, Brian J Mingus <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>

Wow, I'll give that a spin when I've next got consistent access to the net
(I think that the hotel lobby is not the best place for that :-) )

Thanks,
-Liam

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
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