I’ve been discussing with the folks at CrossRef (the largest registry of
Digital Object Identifiers, think of it as the ICANN of science) how to
accurately measure the impact of traffic driven from Wikipedia/Wikimedia to
scholarly resources.
While digging into their data, we realized that since Wikimedia started the
HTTPS switchover and an increasing portion of inbound traffic happens over SSL,
Wikimedia sites may have stopped advertising themselves as sources of referred
traffic to external sites. While this is a literal implication of HTTPS, it
means that Wikimedia's impact on traffic directed to other sites is becoming
largely invisible and Wikimedia might be turning into a large source of dark
traffic.
I wrote a proposal reviewing the CrossRef use case and discussing how other top
web properties deal with this issue by adopting a so-called "Referrer Policy”:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_referrer_policy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_referrer_policy>
Feedback is welcome on the talk page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikimedia_referrer_policy
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikimedia_referrer_policy>
Dario
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