Problem: One of the key metrics for both internal impact, and partner reporting is the number of external links to a partner’s resource, added in a given month This works as a good proxy for number of citations to a particular database or partner resource, but doesn’t actually demonstrate the impact of the donation, or the per-editor contribution, and it is very labor intensive (all of the current tools don’t reliably do this: Hay’s External link tool (http://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/exturl/ )requires manual review of the metrics, and Linkypedia (http://linkypedia.inkdroid.org/) is overtaxed with considerable bottlenecks and reliability questions. Our goals is to create a tool that actually tracks the level of usage of external materials, especially as they are available in references, and do so while tracking, automatically, per-editor and per-url historical changes overtime.
Potential implementation strategies:
- provide external app that can capitalize on the Special:LinkSearch functionality, to compare historical addition of links (see for example, Hay’s external link tool: tools.wmflabs.org/hay/exturl/index.php ), creating regular reports on select links
- Extend Wikimetrics to look at the addition of external links added by a cohort and/or help discover possible members of a cohort by external link additions using string searches
- Write a new tool, that digs directly out of the API, via A Halfacker’s recommendation on strategies for building such a tool
- Ride on the backs of new project by WikiProject X: reference indexing Wikibase instance: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111066
Major non-TWL use cases:
- GLAM-Wiki projects: both identify link usage change over time, and attaching that information to users helps identify potential new contributors to the project, and reward participation and association with the GLAM institution
- Citoid development and support- historical knowledge of what needs to be supported, as most common citations, will allow for greater accuracy of citoid scrappers
- Anti-Spam - currently changes in addition of links, is large dependent on semi-manual discovery of individuals and/or other mechanisms which are responsive to recent changes. With a more direct mapping of changes in links, we might be able to identify other trends.
Basic description of the needs can be found at