Talk:Wiki Project Med/traffic

Is Lane tripping?

I drafted the initial version of this page.

I will be the first to say that sometimes I focus on something I ought not, or that I misdirect myself and start to want things that are not important. Could I have some feedback from others? I really want health traffic information. Is it so important as I imagine? Also, I really would like whatever information I share publicly to be authenticated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Is this the best organization to verify this kind of data? Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:07, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

I support this 100%. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 01:57, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

I checked in with this user - the support is for the proposal on the page, and not for the proposal here to declare me crazy. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:26, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

You mean I'm not the only one this happens to? ;-) Biosthmors (talk) 23:41, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Request for feedback

I requested feedback on this at the analytics mailing list and the medicine mailing list. I will respond to some concerns raised on those lists here. Anyone can subscribe to those email lists if they like. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:26, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Should people read health content on Wikipedia?

In this thread someone said "I sincerely hope that people around the world only use Wikipedia as *a* source for health information." The implication is that there is something insufficient about health content on Wikipedia.

This is a great concern and it needs to be reviewed, and it already has been. In summary, the community of editors which has been developing health content since the inception of Wikipedia has always developed an maintained standards. Some health information is appropriate for Wikipedia and some is not. There are systems in place for checking content and keeping high quality standards. Right now there are no major outstanding complaints which would drive anyone to suggest that Wikipedia would be better with the health information guidelines radically changed.

More information can be found in these places:

• en:Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles
• en:Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer
• and of course literally thousands of pages of hundreds of people's discussion at en:WP:Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine

In summary - Wikipedians should feel confident that the process of developing health content on Wikipedia is proceeding in a reasonable way. A large number of people including a consensus of stakeholders in health education find the content useful and no one yet has expressed, explained, and defended a strong repulsion to its existence.

People should only read health content on Wikipedia when they wish to do so, have no better options, and are sufficiently informed of the nature of Wikipedia. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:26, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Traffic: Wikipedia versus individuals

Suppose that someone were to say that Wikipedia was a popular source of health information. To what extent would it be meaningful to count the number of people getting health information from Wikipedia versus when they get information in person from a health care provider? This was raised in a thread.

The reason why this comparison should be examined is because right now and previously throughout history, there is nearly universal consensus that the best source of health information is a professional health care provider. In practically all cultures health care provision is a profession. It is completely true that physicians and other health care providers do something intuitive and deep that other sources of information like texts cannot replicate.

In discussions of media and popularity, I propose that the metric to be compared is individual sources of information and not source types. If Wikipedia's health content constitutes a single published work, then I would argue that it is legitimate to count all traffic to any part of the entire work and get some number which can be compared to a similar metric from another single source. Someone may say, "If one calculated the number of conversations or facts shared by all physicians in the world with their patients, then that sum which represents the count of all these conversations is the number which ought to be compared to other mass media channels." I do not feel that this is a good comparison, because I feel that each individual physician is more like a single media source rather than more like a part of a single media unit composed of all physicians in the world. From a practical perspective, the implication of this is that if all health content on Wikipedia could actually give "perfect" information by Wikipedia standards, then the quality of information which all users get would be as good as it could be in this mass media channel. However, to perfect the experience that people have in getting information from their doctors would require the knowledge and communication of each doctor individually to be perfected.

In summary - the collective of doctors is not an instance of mass media which can be developed at a single point and delivered to large audiences. Each doctor delivers personal media to their patients, and while that has a utility, it should not be classified as mass media. There is no precedent for calling this kind of communication mass media.

A lot of people have this idea. I have trouble addressing it but it is my opinion that something is different between published mass-distributed media and conversations between individuals. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:42, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

The drop

How does one explain the recent drop in page-view statistics for WikiProject Medicine articles? Biosthmors (talk) 08:10, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

To what drop are you referring?

The big annual drop is the summer drop, and that happens with all search engine queries in the summer. Among other causes this has something to do with students not using the Internet because in many places they do not take classes in summer. The other reason is change to something to do with Mediawiki. user:Anthonyhcole followed the Mediawiki problem and asked a lot of questions about it. I forgot the cause, but as I recall, the problem was that software was not counting views and not that people were using the Internet less.

The big big drop would come if search engines deprecated Wikipedia articles for some reason, because search engine traffic is the major driver of Wikipedia traffic. Although so far as I know there have never been public statements about how any search engine treats Wikipedia, many Wikipedians suspect that all search engines give some kind of preferential treatment to Wikipedia because it is earning special treatment for its history of satisfying user queries. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:58, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what's behind the drop Biosthmors mentions. The drop Blue Rasberry mentions was due to mediawiki not reporting SSL access for a few months, but that was sorted out in May. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 23:07, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

For an example, en:deep vein thrombosis had 104609 views in Sep 2012 but 72434 views in Sep 2013. Pick 10 articles in en:WP:MED1500 at random and see what you get? Biosthmors (talk) 23:24, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure about how any of these technical details might influence those stats. Biosthmors (talk) 23:25, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

It could be an increase in mobile use, which never was counted in any way. The best answer is that I do not know and do not know where to begin to find out. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:59, 15 October 2013 (UTC)