.....at least on Wikipediocracy, so far as we can tell. According to
Business Insider and
Search Engine Land, Wikipedia has been losing hits all year, and in mid-August Jimmy Wales wrote in his User Talk page that
"We know there is a longterm issue with decreasing traffic from Google but this article makes it seem like something new and "sudden" and "massive" has happened." Afterwards, the Wikimedia Foundation issued a
pdf file written by
Ironholds (Oliver Keyes) himself, which was mostly graph charts.
Above is a chart from
SimilarWeb which was featured in the
Business Insider article; if you click on it you can see it goes from January 15th to June 15th and the views start at two billion and four hundred million, spike on March 15th at two billion and five hundred million, then slip back to two billion and three hundred million from April 15th to May 15th, before slip-sliding through June and July.
What was the cause? Wikipedia finished switching from the regular hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) over to HTTPS, the secure version of it. Of course, that killed the bots who come to Wikipedia for a huge number of reasons, so the "false clicks" dropped. The other thing are smartphones (there are technical issues doing editing work on Wikipedia through mobile devices.) The last thing is Google's "answer box" which pops up if you ask the search engine questions. Wikipedia was the the
fifth-ranked website in the world early last year; now it is
tenth. It sits below
Yahoo,
VKontakte,
Live.com,
Odnoklassniki.ru,
Yandex, and
Instagram. And those sit below the "Holy" Trinity of
Facebook-
Google-
Youtube. That must be humiliating.
Hey, maybe that's what will kill Wikipedia. Not another similar project -- social media will bleed its editors and readers away. It's not a "reference work", it's busywork.
ReplyDeleteThis would be a great time for Facebook to start its own encyclopedia, it could kill WP in a year or less.
In fact, there was some discussion on Jimbotalk starting on 14 August.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=prev&oldid=676302900#WP_traffic_from_Google_declining
Which went by with almost no other attention, although Kohs posted it on WO on the 13th. And was ignored.
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=3695&p=148192#p148192
Malleus posted a WO thread on the 16th, about Jimbo's "list of toxic personalities", relating to attempts to get rid of misogynists--which quickly became a pointless argument.
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=6727
I can't find ANY other mention on WO of the traffic decline or the Business Insider article. WO is well and truly fucking itself into oblivion. Focusing on shit minutiae, ignoring the full picture. Squabbling. And still praying for a "miracle" to "save" their magical website. Idiocy.
The utter implosion of Wikipediocracy is a sign that messageboards for ex-Wikiheads are a waste of time, because they become other battlefields to fight the same sort of Wikiwars they carried out in Jimbo's Jungle.
DeleteReading battles imported to Wikipediocracy is a popcorn diversion.
DeleteWikipediocracy lacks gravitas. They drove weighty contributors away.
Publicity about Wikipedia shenanigans is on the uptick, so Wikipediocracy served a purpose.
Looking forward to a substantial published book critiquing Wikipedia. Readers need a referenced timeline of the defining events, people, and strategies that led to Wikipedia’s problems.
"Looking forward to a substantial published book critiquing Wikipedia."
DeleteCertain people (not me) have a book ready to go, but they can't find a publisher (from what I hear.)
"Have not yet found a publisher," surely. It's not an insurmountable hurdle. As rejections rise, so does discouragement.
DeleteSometimes a re-write makes sense, sometimes not.