My colleagues Andrew Shepherd and Carlos Dasilva in Rome believe in the power of the Wikipedia.
They have identified that page hits to FAO's Agro-industries and Infrastructure Division website coming from Wikipedia articles were relatively high and thus encouraged colleagues to create new wikipedia articles or modifiy existing ones by adding references and links to FAO's websites and online publications.
Visits to AGS website in January 2009 as the result of inserting pages or links into Wikipedia.
Agricultural marketing 64
Contract farming 43
Food 39
Food industry 39
Wholesale marketing 12
Corporate farming 11
Food marketing 11
Post-harvest handling 9
So I've now made my first contribution to Wikipedia by creating the French version of the article on Profesionnal association: "Interprofession", which very conveniently links to the French version of FAO's agricultural marketing group website and to our latest publication on commodity associations in developing countries, in French. Let's see if the magic will work as well from the French Wikipédia.
Lesson learned: if you want people to visit your website, write an article of encyclopedic nature on Wikipedia and reference your work and websites there.
Does it really work? I'll follow up with Andrew and Carlos in a few months to see if hits to our French website have increased.
Of course, I've been told another way of getting visitors to a website is to get other websites to create links to the targeted site. Supposedly, Google algorithms pick that up to rank their search results. Noticed the number of URLs to my Division's work on this post? ;-)
Wikipedia logo: © Wikipedia
Stupid cupid, stop picking on me
Connie Francis, The best of/ Millenium collection, Sba
Latest feedback from Andrew:
ReplyDeleteThe French wikipedia page I created resulted in 22 hits onto FAO's website in April.
By comparison, the English language Wikipedia page resulted in 120 hits on the same FAO website in English.
If we assume that English and French speakers do not differ by nature in their interest for agricultural marketing, then one can only conclude that French wikipedia does not have as many users as the English site.