The click-through rate tends to be low, but Wikipedia is so popular that this still generates substantial traffic to the online sources that get cited frequently. The question is how much.
If you can tolerate the analogy, think of reference links as equivalent to a durable type of linkspam. Reference links that meet our reliable sources guideline seldom get removed from articles except during edit disputes. Our policies and practices actively encourage this type of linking, and newspapers of record are among the greatest beneficiaries. Estimate how many thousands of Wikipedia references link to archival WSJ articles. It would be interesting to communicate with reliable source regarding how much traffic they receive from Wikipedia. Ultimately it's better for us if our volunteers spend more time improving articles instead of replacing dead source links. And although I won't lose any sleep if Rupert Murdoch's income dips slightly next year, I'd like to see The New York Times meet its mortgage payments. -Durova On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Bod Notbod <bodnot...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Charles Matthews > <charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > > >> If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles > >> would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old > >> articles... > > I wonder how true this is. > > Perhaps I'll be laughed out of court... but my tendency when I read > Wikipedia is that I see a sentence in an article, note that it is > referenced, click the number to see what the reference is but *hardly* > *ever* click the reference link either to confirm that the reference > is accurate nor to find out more. > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > -- http://durova.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
