Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-09-06/Traffic report

Influence of Reddit on Wikipedia pageviews
Regarding "Reddit, which bills itself as 'the front page of the Internet' because Wikipedia doesn't, has been a major factor in driving traffic here":

That's probably true if "here" means the Top 25 pages, and in any case there is no doubt that the traffic of an individual page linked from a popular Reddit can spike considerably. (By the way, there is an academic paper about this, which we haven't yet covered in the "recent research" section - if anyone is interested in writing a review, let me know; otherwise I might possibly do it myself in our next issue a month from now.)

However, before we get too excited (or worried) about Reddit's "role in aiding Wikipedia", let's not forget that the top 25 articles receive only a tiny, tiny sliver of Wikipedia's pageviews overall, where the ratio of Reddit referrals is so small that it was not even called out separately in the above chart (from this 2015 research). Of course I absolutely agree that it's worth thinking about how to better draw people's attention to the information on Wikipedia (there has already been quite a bit of work on this by editors, the Foundation and other Wikimedia organizations, but there may be many more opportunities that we have not made use of fully yet).

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:03, 7 September 2016 (UTC)


 * PS: Out of curiosity, I ran the actual numbers (for August 24, the day after the TIL for Tic Tac was posted). On that day, 0.5% of pageviews on the English Wikipedia had a referrer from Reddit - so very much not dominant, although still twice as large as the traffic coming from Facebook. The Tic Tac article itself though had 81% of its pageviews coming directly from Reddit.


 * Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 07:21, 8 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Tbayer (WMF), that paper does look interesting, I'll give it closer read and see if I can't write something up about it. And yes you are correct that the commentary was referring to articles making the Top 25.  Redditors on TIL clearly use wikipedia's vast store of articles to find interesting things to highlight, and thus random articles will make the Top 25 as a result.  I don't think this is bad, if anything it probably influences why reddit seems to like wikipedia so much.--Milowent • hasspoken  03:08, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

Can we talk about how the Signpost allowed a biased and factually-incorrect rant be published for all the world to see? Also, wouldn't Wikipedia trying to push popular articles force the site to cater to clicks and go down the road of clickbait that has befallen many other websites? 24.113.234.93 (talk) 20:59, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
 * No and no. The folks that do this report always do a bang-up job. You're welcome. Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 01:51, 10 September 2016 (UTC)
 * The commentary above that you complain about is not really about articles that make the Top 25, but about other well known issues with Reddit. I am on reddit and aware of these issues, as are many of us.  Don't take it personally.--Milowent • hasspoken  03:01, 10 September 2016 (UTC)