Search Engine Land has a Sept 2015 article on the topic of reduced ranking
of Wikipedia:
http://searchengineland.com/study-despite-wikipedias-visibility-decline-in-…
This is based on a short study by Stone Temple:
https://www.stonetemple.com/google-still-loves-wikipedia-more-than-its-own-…
My thoughts:
Some of the traffic to WMF will be replaced by different interaction
methods of asking questions, eg: "ok google, what is the capital of france
=> "The capital of Francis is Paris"; and by direct answers on the SERP,
eg: "who is mark twain"[1] returns a direct answer at the top, referencing
biography.com, along with an knowledge pane on the right sourced from
Wikipedia and likely other mixed sources.
I think having traffic replaced by direct answers is still a good thing as
it fits within the mission[2] and vision[3] of WMF of disseminating
knowledge. The primary downside I see is the shallowness of the knowledge
presented; the quick answer lacks the discovery aspect of going to a full
wiki article and becoming lost delving numerous links deep.
--
[1]
https://google.com/search?q=who+is+mark+twain
[2]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement
[3]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision
Thanks,
--justin
On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Discovery,
Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results
from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web
search engines.
I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including
cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying
to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors
spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine
rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also,
is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of
Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource
and Commons) when people use web search engines?
Thanks,
Pine
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