User talk:Bluerasberry/Readership of Wikipedia

Facebook outage, Wikipedia effects

• https://twitter.com/AmirSarabadanii/status/1445222970503401477

There is hardly any public data about the relationship between Wikipedia and other major media platforms. I am sharing this here not because it is a reliable source, but because this is the level of information that we have available. If anyone is looking for such information I think it is not to be found. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:57, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Readership behavior

Clicks on images

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01868

Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:34, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

reading otherwise https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11848

Bluerasberry (talk) 21:16, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

 Done Incorporated these sources. Bluerasberry (talk) 19:56, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

2015 thoughts

https://wikipediaviews.org/

• Naik, Vipul (27 Mar 2015). "The great decline in Wikipedia pageviews (condensed version) - LessWrong". www.lesswrong.com.

I started and wrote much of meta:Traffic reporting, so some history is there. From about 2008 - 2016 there was Stats.grok.se, called "Henrik's tool", for viewing Wikipedia traffic. That broke, then this tool was the best. Starting in around 2016 the Wikimedia Foundation began providing the Pageviews tool, which is now well supported.

WikipediaViews.org was an essential tool for me in the between time. The blog post above described some challenges with interpreting the data. There is still more which could be documented. I am sharing this as insider information of perhaps the best published consideration of Wikipedia traffic data for sets of individual articles, before the Wikimedia Foundation recognized the importance of this. Bluerasberry (talk) 19:50, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Is the first overview of Wikipedia's audience?

I think this article, "Readership of Wikipedia", is the first attempt to summarize what others have said about Wikipedia's audience. By "audience" I mean the readers or consumers of Wikipedia. If I missed something then edit.

I edited Wikipedia for the first time in 2004. I edited Wikipedia with intent to reach an audience in 2005, had a paid Wikipedia editing role in 2006, and began seriously editing Wikipedia for information distribution in 2008. In 2012 I took a full-time, permanent, salaried position for professional Wikipedia development. In all of these activities, I have been listening to hear anyone talk about Wikipedia's readership. As I write this draft and review all these publications, I feel that I have never identified documentation of Wikipedia as a communication channel to reach readers. I think something is misplaced or in error or unspoken due to some pressure, because neither I have said enough about Wikipedia's readership nor has anyone else that I have identified.

The value of Wikipedia is that it precisely reaches readers at the time of their request for particular information. Reaching an audience at the perfect time has been a fundamental challenge in the field of communication, and Wikipedia offers a solution to this age-old problem. So much is said about Wikipedia's development and community; I appreciate the community, but in my view, Wikipedia's most valuable resource is not that it organizes a process to produce information. I appreciate the community review process and ethical oversight, but it will happen that artificial intelligence will someday replace much of the community production of media, so the content creation process will not be as critical in the future. The scarce and amazing feature that I like is that Wikipedia actually delivers content from the community overseers to the global audience, and it does this at a massive scale.

In all the sources I checked here, no one has expressed the idea in this way. I should write the essay. Regardless, here are the sources I found, and this article is my summary. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:32, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Checked the books - no readership info

I checked the books with Wikipedia as a subject. In those books I did not find information about Wikipedia's readership. I am sharing this as null information, and my interpretation of this null info is that the authors or editors did not talk about Wikipedia's audience because they did not identify this topic as part of the established discourse or as an issue to raise.

Books are special because they have space to present an overview, and the author or editor can raise all issues which they think important. Given hundreds of pages to say anything, the people who made books did not include discussion of Wikipedia's audience. I am not going to list the books because I think it is enough to say that I checked about 15 of them, which was all that I could find. Most of them are familiar to the Wikipedia community, and Wikipedians who follow the community news would expect what I am reporting. No surprises here. Bluerasberry (talk) 19:10, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Piccardi papers

• Piccardi, Tiziano (2022), How We Use Wikipedia: Studying Readers' Behavior with Navigation Traces (PDF) (thesis), Lausanne, Switzerland: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Piccardi submitted a thesis in 2022 which included multiple papers previously published. The thesis is a nice collection and connects the other papers, but it also is seemingly not available right now except as a preprint. The doi is http://dx.doi.org/10.5075/epfl-thesis-8187 but this resolves to a closed university repository right now. Bluerasberry (talk) 01:30, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Epilepsy surgery

Consider

• Kinney, Michael Owen; Brigo, Francesco (February 2020). "What can Google Trends and Wikipedia-Pageview analysis tell us about the landscape of epilepsy surgery over time?". Epilepsy & Behavior. 103: 106533. doi:10.1016/j.yebeh.2019.106533.

This project attempts to review pageviews to Wikipedia for the topic of epilepsy surgery.

The researcher attempted to check traffic to Wikipedia articles. As a Wikipedia editor who looks at traffic, I observe the following:

1. This person did not find an existing method to follow. One does not exist. They made a good attempt at designing their own.
2. Their interest was in epilepsy surgery. Two articles that they disregarded in their analysis were epilepsy and seizure. Both of these are high traffic, and the epilepsy article has a section on surgery. I do not have the words or clarity of mind to express myself here, but I find it odd that so many researchers often wish to disregard the top-level Wikipedia articles when examining Wikipedia interest or development in specific topics. This is a common reaction when non-wiki people examine Wikipedia.
3. The researchers employed the popular conception of search, which is expecting an engine to recommend information in a search engine results page. Wikipedia does not do this like the other engines, and consequently, the researchers just reported that Wikipedia lacked certain info when I think more of what they wanted was present.

Their overall conclusion was that people who want epilepsy surgery information are not coming to Wikipedia. While I agree with their interpretation based on the evidence they found, and that they attempted as good of a data-collection method as they could, I wish that our infrastructure could have better supported them. I feel like Wikipedia had something for them and they were unable to access it. There are no sources to share to guide them through this basic process. Bluerasberry (talk) 19:16, 14 March 2024 (UTC)