User:Sebwite/navbox study

There is a question I am trying to answer: Does a navbox improve readership and editorial improvement of an article?

The answer to this question will help in determining whether or not navboxes are a useful tool on Wikipedia.

This page is dedicated to a case study to determine:
 * 1) If readership rises following placement of a navbox on a page
 * 2) If editing rises following placement of a navbox on a page
 * 3) If there are any other benefits to a navbox

Readership/Editing
Template:Commercial air travel was used for this study. It was created on February 27, 2008. It listed 28 articles in the final version published on that date.

This site provides information the number of times any Wikipedia page has been visited since December 2007.

Conclusion
Out of these 28 articles, 27 had existed in January 2008, the month before the navbox was created. Only these 27 articles are counted in the totals.

Most of these articles had an increase in both readership and editing. In 24 of the 27 articles, readership increased. In 22 of the 27 articles, editing increased.

Overall, in these 27 articles, readership increased by an average of 406 views, or about 8.5% between January and March 2008. Editing increased by about 1.8 edits, or about 37% during this period.

This study shows that both readership and editing are likely to increase as a result of the placement of a navbox on a page.

Criticism
These results do not justify the statement of conclusion. The conclusion is statistically invalid. The data is raw, and not normalized to seasonal and normal month-to-month variations in readership. I checked only one of these articles and it showed month-to-month page hit variations far greater than the conclusion's results. This being a travel-related set of articles, it would appear reasonable to expect that readership would be higher in the spring than in the middle of winter. Kbrose (talk) 04:15, 16 September 2010 (UTC)