On his blog, statistician for the Wikimedia Analytics team Erik Zachte asked, “Which single Wikimedia metric would inspire you most?” Here is my response to his blog post.
I want page views for specific sets of articles, and I want this data presented in such a way to call for people to respond to it.
My personal interest is in health articles. I have a hunch that Wikipedia is the world’s single most consulted source of general health information, which is a specific case of my belief that Wikipedia is the world’s single most consulted source of information which can be found readily with typical keyword searches on a search engine. If anyone made a statement that Wikipedia were the world’s most consulted source of health information, then that would obligate every single government, health foundation, medical research organization, public health office, medical school, and non-profit organization to respond, since all of these institutions are stakeholders in how their service base accesses health information. I want them to respond by beginning to understand that all people who share information with the general public must consider whether their audience is demanding their information through Wikipedia, and if so, the extent to which they are responsible for ensuring that the Wikipedia articles are high quality. I feel like if it were so that if there was supporting evidence that Wikipedia mattered as a source of health information, then that would be the start of Wikipedia’s transition from something which can be ignored to the thing which is the most important concern for a large number of top people working in information dissemination.
Another instance of important pageview data might be the Wiki Loves Monuments programs. UNESCO does great work and is a very necessary organization for providing experts and issuing mandates, and every country also has some kind of cultural or historical office which also designates what heritage sites are most important, but I wonder how the sum of what every government in history has done and the entirety of the United Nations’ media efforts compare to the prestige and awareness WLM has brought to the heritage sites of the world. My suspicion is that WLM as an awareness campaign is an order of magnitude more successful than every other heritage site awareness campaign in the world in all of history put together, if the metric to be considered is number of people who come to be aware of heritage sites based on a media campaign. To me, whatever metric would be supporting evidence for the popularity of health articles would also be supporting evidence for articles relating to monuments. Once a scheme was developed to support bold statements about the impact of either of these, the scheme could be generalized and applied to every other field.
Wikimedia projects are important. I would like to be able to quantify just how important they are relative to comparable projects, and I would like for the analytics team to back me up with data so that I can make bold public statements. The one metric I want is the one that will let me say, “Wikipedia is the most popular source of information in field X and this data supports my saying so…” After I say this, I feel like that would be leaving an open challenge for anyone to either find a more popular source of information or accept my assertion. Whatever response the world may have to such a statement would be very interesting, whether they accept it, challenge it, or ignore it. Thoughts?