Pondering the utility of talk page edits recently, I've begun to wonder: how many of our readers actually look at the talk page as well? I know some writers writing articles on Wikipedia have mentioned or rhapsodized at length on the interest of the talk pages for articles, but they are rare birds and statistically irrelevant.
It might be enough simply to know how much traffic to talk pages there is period. I doubt editors make up much of Wikipedia's traffic, with the shriveling of the editing population, which never kept pace with the growth into a top 10/20 website, so that would give a good upper bound. It would seem to be very small; there's not a single Talk page in the top 1000 on http://stats.grok.se/en/top and comparing a few articles like Anime, Talk:Anime has 273 hits over an entire month (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Talk%3AAnime) while the article has 128,657 hits (a factor of 471); or Talk:Barack Obama with 1800 over the month (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Talk%3ABarack_Obama) compared to Barack Obama, 504,827 hits (http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/Barack%20Obama) for a factor of 280. The raw stats in http://dammit.lt/wikistats are currently unavailable; I've bugged domas to get it back up but it's still been down for hours, so I went to http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/2011/2011-09/ instead - each file seems to be an hour of the day so I downloaded one day's worth and gunzipped them all which is enough info to get a good idea of the right ratio. We do some quick shell scripting: grep -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' pagecounts-* | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd +|bc ~> 582771 grep -e '^en ' pagecounts-* | grep -v -e '^en Talk:' -e '^en talk:' | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | paste -sd + | bc ~> 202680742 Looks somewhat sane - 58,2771 for all talk page hits versus 2,0268,0742 for all non-talk page hits A factor of 347 is pretty much around where I was expecting based on those 2 pages. And Domas says the statistics exclude API hits but includes logged-in editor hits, so we can safely say that anonymous users made far *fewer* than 58k page views that day and hence the true ratios are worse than 471/280/347. - If we take the absolutely most favorable ratio, Obama's at 280, and then further assume it was looked at by 0 logged-in users (yeah right), then that implies something posted on its talk page will be seen by <0.35% of interested readers (504827/1800*1.0)*100). - If we use the aggregate statistic and say, generously, that registered users make up only 90% of the page views, then something on the talk page will be seen by <0.028% of interested readers ((202680742/582771*0.1)*100). I suggest that the common practice of 'moving reference/link to the Talk page' be named what it really is: a subtle form of deletion. It would be a service to our readers to end this practice entirely: if a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance to make use of it. * one of my little projects is compiling edits where I or another have added a valuable source to an article Talk page, complete with the most relevant excerpts from that source, and seeing whether anyone bothered making any use of that source/link in any fashion. I have not finished, but to summarize what I have seen so far: that justification for deletion is a dirty lie. Hardly any sources are ever restored. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
