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Help! Cultural institutions meet Wikimedians - Part II
Just over a week until GLAM-WIKI in Canberra on the 6-7 August, a workshop on how cultural institutions can work together with the Wikimedia community (and vice versa). Can you help?
In preparation for GLAM-WIKI, participants have been asked to answer a series of questions – and I thought the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums within the DigitalNZ community might like to take a collaborative stab at them.
These questions are more specific than the general thoughts I asked for in my first post on cultural institutions meeting wikimedians.
So if you’re willing, please post your answers in the comments below. You don’t have to post the actual numbers, particularly to part C (you could just say “yes” or “no”) – but if you want to, go for it! Anonymity is fine.
If you don’t feel comfortable sharing this information publicly, perhaps just consider the questions within your organisation and team.
A - In preparation for attending GLAM-WIKI it would be very helpful if you could ask the web-manager at your institution what percentage of inbound traffic to your website comes from people clicking through via Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects. What do you expect this percentage to be and are you surprised by the answer?
B - Please think of a topic that is integral to your institution (e.g. for the Australian War Memorial this might be "Australian military history") and type it into Google. Does a Wikipedia article appear in the first page of the results? Does it appear above your own institution's website? Does your institution have a mission statement that includes a phrase along the lines of "The [institution] is dedicated to helping people of all ages learn about [aforementioned topic]"? If so, has your institution previously investigated trying to fulfil this mission with Wikipedia as a one of the 'strings to its bow'?
C - Are you able to roughly calculate the financial cost to your institution of administering copyright/access to your institution's own and/or controlled and/or out-of-copyright content? Are you also able to roughly calculate the amount your institution makes in revenue as a result of this administration (for example, through content sales)? Is there a significant positive difference between these two numbers
I’m really interested to see what kind of collective picture we form. Aren’t you?
4 comments | Post a comment Leave a comment
Posted by Paul Rowe | 29 Jul 2009 10:38
Question A:
NZMuseums - 10 months stats
Wikipedia - 4.8% of referrals
Google Images - 30.3% of referrals
Posted by Courtney Johnston | 29 Jul 2009 13:35
I've used the National Library's main site http://www.natlib.govt.nz (www) and the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand http://rsnz.natlib.govt.nz (RSNZ)to answer the first two questions.
I got monthly referrer stats for the two sites for the past 6 months.
The www site gets 0.1% of its visits from Wikipedia: it usually appeared around the 20th position on the list of referrers. Over the 6 months this ranged from 52 to 89 visits. Compare this to Google, which sent between 27-33% of visits (27,083-37,946 visits). [Pays to note the top referrer is recorded as 'None'.]
Wikipedia was consistently in the top 10 referrers to RSNZ. It sent between 0.3 and 0.5% of visits (113-189 visits). Similar figures were obtained for Ask Jeeves and MSN Search. For this site, Google was the chief referrer, sending 43-53% of visits (15,988-23,053 visits).
I did the Google test for the phrases 'family history New Zealand', Māori research New Zealand', 'history research New Zealand' and 'Alexander Turnbull Library'. The first page of results consistently had the www site in the first spot, and Wikipedia didn't appear.
I also did the Google test for five 19th/early 20th century scientists; James Hector, Ernest Rutherford, Peter Henry Buck, Walter Buller and Walter Mantell. Because of a content-rich exhibition about NZ scientists on the www site it regularly did well (top 5 results), but Wikipedia was first for Hector, Rutherford and Mantell. RSNZ didn't feature on the first page of results.
Posted by Liam Wyatt - Wikimedia Australia | 31 Jul 2009 19:54
I'm interested to see that the % of inbound hits was so low (as low as 0.1%??) yet the Wikipedia article on the topic in question was so high in Google. To me this indicates that there's not much attribution of content from your collection in Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia has articles about topics relevant to your institution. This means Wikipedia's articles on those topics aren't very fleshed out and should be improved - by the people who know most about the topic - You. Then again... I would say that, wouldn't :-)
Posted by Paul Rowe | 03 Aug 2009 12:50
Possibly Courtney's figures appear low because of the inclusion of a referrer category of 'None'. I suspect that Wikipedia's proportion of actual referrals is much higher and the figure of 0.1% is the percentage of all visitors to the site that came from Wikipedia. NZMuseums visitors from Wikipedia based on all visitors was also 0.1%.