This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
One of the two factors in deciding whether a particular topic is
primary for a given term is usage: whether it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term.
A typical question, therefore, is: what proportion of readers who land on a given disambiguation page are interested in a particular article linked there. Relevant information can usually be extracted from the clickstream dataset, but in rare cases a dedicated test can be performed.
The clickstream dataset shows how many times readers have arrived at article A from article B (typically by following a link). If article A is a disambiguation page, then this data will neatly show how many of the viewers of the disambiguation page have sought each of the linked articles there.
The most recent month is visualised by https://wikinav.toolforge.org. Data from earlier months (going back to 2017) is available at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/clickstream/, where it's accessible for those who are comfortable with querying text files or using spreadsheets.
There are some limitations: the data is available only on a monthly basis, and links that have been followed fewer than 10 times in the given month are not included.
In cases when the clickstream data is not available or not easily applicable, usage can be gauged by piping the links of interest via redirects that otherwise receive no traffic, and observing what traffic they will now get after a certain period of time. The procedure is as follows:
{{rcat shell|{{R from statistical redirect|dabpage=Yourpage (disambiguation)}}}}
to avoid confusing people who stumble upon it.There are obviously limits to this method's usefulness. It takes effort and time, and the piped links may confuse readers as well as editors. Article traffic from other search engines (e.g. Google) is not factored in. (Then again, those search engines have their own ways of getting readers to the correct article.) If any new redirects have been created, they may happen to get traffic from other sources too (thereby affecting the reliability of the data).
Previous discussions and uses of the latter method are for:
An additional suggestion comes from one of these discussions:
An extensive discussion of various "data collection" redirects occurred at WT:WikiProject Redirect in early 2021.
This is an
essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of
Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been
thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
One of the two factors in deciding whether a particular topic is
primary for a given term is usage: whether it is highly likely—much more likely than any other single topic, and more likely than all the other topics combined—to be the topic sought when a reader searches for that term.
A typical question, therefore, is: what proportion of readers who land on a given disambiguation page are interested in a particular article linked there. Relevant information can usually be extracted from the clickstream dataset, but in rare cases a dedicated test can be performed.
The clickstream dataset shows how many times readers have arrived at article A from article B (typically by following a link). If article A is a disambiguation page, then this data will neatly show how many of the viewers of the disambiguation page have sought each of the linked articles there.
The most recent month is visualised by https://wikinav.toolforge.org. Data from earlier months (going back to 2017) is available at https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/clickstream/, where it's accessible for those who are comfortable with querying text files or using spreadsheets.
There are some limitations: the data is available only on a monthly basis, and links that have been followed fewer than 10 times in the given month are not included.
In cases when the clickstream data is not available or not easily applicable, usage can be gauged by piping the links of interest via redirects that otherwise receive no traffic, and observing what traffic they will now get after a certain period of time. The procedure is as follows:
{{rcat shell|{{R from statistical redirect|dabpage=Yourpage (disambiguation)}}}}
to avoid confusing people who stumble upon it.There are obviously limits to this method's usefulness. It takes effort and time, and the piped links may confuse readers as well as editors. Article traffic from other search engines (e.g. Google) is not factored in. (Then again, those search engines have their own ways of getting readers to the correct article.) If any new redirects have been created, they may happen to get traffic from other sources too (thereby affecting the reliability of the data).
Previous discussions and uses of the latter method are for:
An additional suggestion comes from one of these discussions:
An extensive discussion of various "data collection" redirects occurred at WT:WikiProject Redirect in early 2021.