Saturday 2 March 2013

Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 2)

This post continues from Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 1) which looked at a number of statistics relating to page views and links using linkypedia (well - a slightly customised version of linkypedia).

Part of my reasons for doing this might have become clear based on a subsequent post on this blog: Wikimedian in Residence at NHM.

This post uses a  feature I added to linkypedia to save a copy of pages that link to the NHM website into a database. This allows for some quick queries to identify both the type of pages, and the content they contain.

13580 pages have links to the domain www.nhm.ac.uk

This includes (type of page, number of pages):

User pages 44
User talk pages 39
WikiProjects 2
WikiProjects pages 6
WikiProjects talk pages 20
Wikipedia Signpost 3
Village Pump 1
Reference Desk 9
Graphics Lab 1
Copyright Problems 3
Suspected Copyright Violtaions 2
Possibly unfree files 2
Media copyright questions 1
Articles for creation 2
Featured article candidates 4

Examples of other queries that can be run:

Biota InfoBox 12768  (can be assumed to be good indicator of pages about a taxon)
Type specimen 52
Lepidoptera 12773
Stub 12412
Lepidoptera stub 12190

This looks like the NHM has quite a sizeable Wikipedia footprint, however  a huge majority of these are stub lepidoptera pages with very little content besides a link back to a project on the NHM website.

Sample stub lepidoptera page (Accessed 02 March 2013)


Considering the number of type specimens the museum holds (20,000 mosses alone) the figure of 52 is one that is definitely open to some improvement.

 Creative Commons License
Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 2) by Ed Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

ShareThis

Copyright