Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/In the news

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As a technical note, I am highly skeptical about the claimed "tenfold increase". That's the sort of factoid which often gets echoed without any checking or context. Wikipedia articles are often re-used by spam websites, so it's entirely possible to have the entire traffic increase be from the activity of web crawlers and site scrapers. At the very least, there should be some burden on the claimant to investigate this, as it currently reads like a marketing pitch. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 05:04, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Marketing what? I'm reading it as they noticed an increase in traffic to their site coming from wikipedia.org referrers, and sure enough, it was correlated with an on-wiki effort to improve coverage of that subject area. What does that have to do with advertising and web crawlers? Powers ^T 22:27, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

The next sentence in the article makes it clear he thinks "traffic" == "researchers". That's not necessarily true. It's entirely possible that "traffic" == "'bots". -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 08:40, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Ah, okay, I see what you mean now. It's of course possible the claimant did investigate and found out that most of the traffic was non-bot-related. Powers ^T 12:14, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but that wasn't stated or implied. And it's a common error for people unfamiliar with web analytics to confuse 'bot and spam traffic with real readers. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 22:21, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

The Buisnessweek article was an interesting mix of common wikipedia cliches and interesting commentary. I thought the final sentence "How well Wikipedia ages may depend on how much the newbies are allowed to grow up" ,was spot on. Ajbpearce (talk) 00:12, 13 January 2011 (UTC)