User:Mu301/Learning blog/2019-03

Negative population growth
As part of the Wikimedia branding initiative a presentation was published that shows editor engagement at the various Wikimedia sister projects. The data is from November 2018. I'm not clear on how they are counting editors. The number for Wikiversity is given as 187 while our Special:Statistics lists 277 "active users" (Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days.)



Both and  show strong growth at greater than 10% while Wikipedia shows modest growth of about 1% and most projects are somewhere in between. At the other end is, , and in last place Wikiversity with a whopping 13% drop in engagement and the absolute largest shift of any project. I find this troubling if for no other reason that WMF might get a negative impression of our progress. I'll need to look into this further.

In other news the same presentation shows 9.4 million page views here with only News and Species having lower activity. We have a page that collects data about activity on the site at Statistics, for comparison. --mikeu talk 18:22, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Curating cross-wiki links
I'm currently reviewing w:Template:Wiiversity and what links there. There are over 800 articles that include this template. For example:
 * Astrochemistry was linked to Topic:Astrochemistry, a resource that was moved to draft space.
 * Chemist was redlinked to Chemistry, a resource that was moved to draft space.
 * Drunken Sailor (song) which redlinked to Drunken Sailor.
 * History of physics which linked to History of Physics, an abandoned project.
 * Nomic was linked to Learning from Nomic, a long abandoned project stub.
 * Parallel computing was linked to Parallel computing, an orphaned and abandoned stub.

I've started cleaning up the broken links but I also think that we need to draw attention to the best resources created here. Simply linking to a new WV page to draw attention/editors is not likely to improve participation here. It also gives encyclopedia readers the misleading impression that we have low quality resources. --mikeu talk 19:37, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
 * It looks like a review of w:Template:Sister project links is also needed. Chemistry containted a link to Chemistry. --mikeu talk 20:02, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Search Console results
I've been using Google Search Console every couple of years as part of Google/Search and Wikiversity. The process is to determine what topics people are searching for and then look at which pages we have on the subject. The table below shows the top 10 search terms that return wikiversity pages in the results. Computer science, and particularly software, dominates. CTR is the Click Through Rate. The phrase "migrate to new technology" returns ICAU3019A Migrating to new technology in the first page of results leading to a high CTR. The two "ohio scales" queries return Ohio Youth Problems, Functioning and Satisfaction Scales (Ohio Scales).



The full download is now at Google/Search and Wikiversity/2019 if anyone is interested. I'm not sure that there is any actionable knowledge that could be used to improve traffic to our site. I'm attempting to use Data mining techniques to inform my decision making. --mikeu talk 01:39, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Redundancy
A search for the terms "computer software" or "types of computer software" or "type of computer software" all return Types of computer software on the first or second page of results. Note that Google links to the title in lower case, but we also have a more developed resource at Types of Computer Software. Here are the recent page views for both.

Page Views for Types of computer software

Page Views for Types of Computer Software

The lower case title is probably more in line with our naming conventions. Google is linking to it, but it is a stub compared to the other page. I've proposed a merger at Talk:Types of computer software. --mikeu talk 14:45, 26 March 2019 (UTC)


 * The content at Types of Computer Software has been moved to Types of computer software. --mikeu talk 17:24, 31 March 2019 (UTC)