Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-11-10/Dispatches

Pieces

• Idea of double TFA initiated by Remember on October 27 at WT:TFAR and discussed there: Wikipedia talk:TFAR#Presidential candidates - winner on November 5; loser on November 6.

FYI - I originally proposed having the presidential winner on November the 5 and the loser on the 6th. That did not seem to get much traction because people thought it would be too US centric to run the articles back-to-back, and because people thought it would be bias to have the winner on the next day (plus the fact you might not know who the winner is). So then I proposed the alternative to have them both featured on the 4th, and people seemed to really like this idea (and some to really hate it). Remember (talk) 15:57, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Splicing that in so it can be prosified there ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:05, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

• TFA/R discussion: Request added to WP:TFA/R on October 30 by SandyGeorgia, discussion archived at Wikipedia talk:TFAR#November 4a. By November 3, had 28 supports and 12 opposes.
• Wikipedia talk:TFAR#Raul's thoughts on the election-day TFA, on November 3rd, Raul654, the Featured article director, agreed to run the unprecedented double TFA and TFA which had already run on the mainpage, saying:[1]

Ok, so as I read this, ITN isn't going to do anything with the election until after midnight UTC. If that's the case, my largest worry is alleviated. My second worry is setting precedents with regard to featuring (A) two articles at once, or (B) featuring articles on the main page a second time, remain. However, I think this can be dealt with by me saying, here and now, that this is an extremely unusual thing that I have absolutely no intention or desire to repeat in the future. Does that satisfy everyone? Raul654 (talk) 22:06, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

• Blurb: Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 4, 2008 and Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/November 4, 2008
  • John McCain was brought to featured status in August 2008 by User:Ferrylodge, with significant contributions from User:Wasted Time R; each contributed about 1,000 edits
  • Barack Obama was brought to featured status in August 2004 by User:Meelar and this version appeared on the main page on August 18, 2004. The highest article contributors are User:HailFire, User:Tvoz and User:Bobblehead.
    • The article had four Featured article reviews: January 2007, July 2007, April 2008 and September 2008
    • editing restrictions since ?? because ... ???
• ANI discussion of protection: [2]
• Talk:Main page: [3]
• User talk:Raul654: [4]

[5] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:12, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

Media

• http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2008/11/election_day_on.html?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story
• http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/11/04/analysis:-uk-internet-searches-us-election
• http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iYwQxC00pxu4qFJvjc06EWZkQfaAD948LIH00 (referring to this)

Notes from Risker

Hi Sandy, got your message—graceful as ever in sharing the credit! Just a few notes at this point, more may follow once I get my head around things.

• I'd already asked Henrik to create some hour-by-hour article view graphs for the two articles, they might be an interesting visual for this.
• I'll try to work out the periods of time that each article was semi- and fully protected through the course of the day.
• I recall that at one point during the day, the Obama article was getting over 750 hits/hour. The stats remain available, but are a bit complex because hits on pages redirecting to the main articles need to be included. I'll see what I can do to get proper tallies there.
• One of my concerns, particularly during the (North American) daytime, was that it takes about five seconds to revert vandalism; given the number of hits the article was getting, that could mean more people would see those few seconds of vandalism as look at the majority of our articles in an entire week.

I will probably think of more things in the next few days. Risker (talk) 06:35, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Risker; we've got more than a week to work on this, and Jbmurray will likely do a lot of the writing as soon as he gets to it, so I'm just roughing in the pieces for now. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:38, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

I put together a quick look at the page views for the main articles. The chart and statistics do not include other redirects. IF there is more information available, I'd be happy to put it in. Karanacs (talk) 19:17, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I've checked all the traffic through redirects for November 4th, and whilst I can't give an hour-by-hour breakdown, it seems that 7% of McCain's total traffic that day was from redirects, and 15% of Obama's - so we at least can tell roughly how much the graph undershoots. I'll update the daily totals in the article just now. Shimgray | talk | 23:27, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

weekend

I'll help out on this at the weekend. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 19:11, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Potential title

"Dispatches: Historic election proves groundbreaking on the Main Page" –Juliancolton ^{Tropical Cyclone} 01:16, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Another story, from the NYT

Thought you might find this interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/technology/internet/10link.htm?_r=1&oref=slogin Risker (talk) 05:17, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

It notes in passing what the pageviews were - I dug up some numbers on this, and it might be interesting to mention the traffic specifically for the 4th, when the TFAs were live.

Obama's article got 620k hits, whilst McCains got 338k - if we think of this as the division of the "whole traffic", 65% of readers went to Obama. This seems remarkable, but it's quite consistent with the overall average - Obama was getting about 60% through October, and on November 3rd he got almost exactly 65% of the traffic to the two. So our readers preferred to read about Obama, but not by any more than usual. (This says something, but I'm not sure quite what.)

The articles were much more popular than the normal FAs - a FA of the day usually gets, what, 100k hits? Obama got 375,000 more than the previous day, McCain got 200,000 more, and between them they managed almost a million pageviews, with another 120k visiting the article on the election. This is an exceptional rate - it looks like we definitely did well at serving up what readers wanted. Well done to those who pushed for it! Shimgray | talk | 12:35, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Ooops! I see you mentioned this above already. Oh, well... pre-empted :-) Shimgray | talk | 12:39, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Copyeditors needed

I think that the bulk of the content is here now. I would appreciate any help with copyediting. Karanacs (talk) 19:32, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

I've given it a once-over, but I find it to be pretty well done, and not needing too much work. Another pair of eyes would certainly be useful, though.

One question on the protection section: In fact, the Obama article was at semi-protected level for 8 hours 33 minutes, and the McCain one for 7 hours 20 minutes (in two separate episodes of 2 hours 40 mins and 4 hours 40 mins), following a request to Raul from Jossi. The period of full protection between the two semi-protections on the McCain article was in response to edit-warring and vandalism by a sleeper vandalism account. The reinstatement of protection to both articles appears to have been related to edit-warring and the increasing risk of vandalism. Risker (talk) 04:05, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to add whatever is needed, I'm off for the day, only logged on today to see if this was on deadline, and it will publish soon. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:06, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

I've given it a quick tidy, but couldn't spot anything wildly odd. I'll try again later if I have a chance, when more awake. Shimgray | talk | 09:03, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Increase in traffic for both articles when they were on the main page

It's not easy to tell if the traffic that both articles got while they were on the main page was because of the main page or just because on that particular day, people searched online for their names and clicked on the link to Wikipedia (since Wikipedia articles usually appear near the top of search results). A better way of doing the statistics would have been to use a lesser known redirect, like Barry Obama as an example, so that when the traffic spikes it'd be easier to see by how much. Just something useful to remember for next time, perhaps. Gary King (talk) 17:00, 14 November 2008 (UTC)