It has recently come to our attention (the Bosnian Wikipedia community) that there's a staggering discrepancy in page views to the Bosnian Wikipedia (bs.wikipedia.org), and lack of search engine visibility.
Upon investigation, we have concluded that the cause is a decent chunk of views not coming from Google's Knowledge Graph, as is the case for other languages.
The following examples are provided from an incognito browsing session, with the language set to Bosnian, and the region to Bosnia and Herzegovina (&hl=bs, &gl=ba).
- Example #1: Article "USB-C": If said article exists on the Croatian Wikipedia, the Knowledge Graph will not link to the existing Bosnian article, but will show the Croatian one (see below).
- Example #2: Article "Raspberry Pi": If said article does not exist on the Croatian Wikipedia, but does on the Serbian Wikipedia, Google will not link to the existing Bosnian article, but will show the Serbian one (see below).
- Example #3: Article "Docker (softver)": If said article does not exist on the Croatian Wikipedia, nor the Serbian Wikipedia, Google will still not link the existing Bosnian article, but will show the article's name (see below), or it may not show the Knowledge Graph at all.
It looks like there's some sort of fallback set, but it does not include the Bosnian Wikipedia or the Bosnian language isn't explicitly defined.
This cuts the amount of traffic to the Bosnian Wikipedia considerably since most people use Google to look things up, and devalues the hard work our community members put into making new articles as very few people will actually get to see them.
If this is an issue on MediaWiki's end or with some local configuration, let's work out a solution. If it is not, since we are unable to contact Google directly, we were hoping someone here would be able to do so on our behalf.
I've already contacted the Wikimedia Foundation, and a representative suggested I file this ticket, assign it to the Language Team, and tag it with Discovery Search.


