Search Engine Land has a Sept 2015 article on the topic of reduced ranking of Wikipedia: http://searchengineland.com/study-despite-wikipedias-visibility-decline-in-google-it-still-shows-up-more-often-than-google-properties-231277
This is based on a short study by Stone Temple: https://www.stonetemple.com/google-still-loves-wikipedia-more-than-its-own-properties/ My thoughts: Some of the traffic to WMF will be replaced by different interaction methods of asking questions, eg: "ok google, what is the capital of france => "The capital of Francis is Paris"; and by direct answers on the SERP, eg: "who is mark twain"[1] returns a direct answer at the top, referencing biography.com, along with an knowledge pane on the right sourced from Wikipedia and likely other mixed sources. I think having traffic replaced by direct answers is still a good thing as it fits within the mission[2] and vision[3] of WMF of disseminating knowledge. The primary downside I see is the shallowness of the knowledge presented; the quick answer lacks the discovery aspect of going to a full wiki article and becoming lost delving numerous links deep. -- [1] https://google.com/search?q=who+is+mark+twain [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision Thanks, --justin On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 2:27 PM, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Discovery, > > Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results > from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web > search engines. > > I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including > cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying > to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors > spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine > rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also, > is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of > Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource > and Commons) when people use web search engines? > > Thanks, > > Pine > > > _______________________________________________ > discovery mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery > >
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