Wikipedia linking to CPAN
Recently I checked the number of links form the English version of Wikipedia to search.cpan.org and to MetaCPAN.
I even posted it to Reddit that got quite a mixed reaction (18 upvotes 11 downvotes) but many of the links were updated.
Of course there is more to Wikipedia than the English version, so I checked the numbers for the 10 languages listed at the top of Wikipedia and these are the numbers:
MetaCPAN
SCO http https TOTAL
en 566 66 182 814
es 109 0 0 109
ru 100 0 3 103
de 64 2 1 67
it 20 0 0 20
pl 17 0 0 17
zh 54 0 0 54
pt 31 0 0 31
fr 76 5 0 81
ja 173 2 0 175
SCO = search.cpan.org Wikipedia shows the links to http://metacpan.org and https://metacpan.org in two separate searches so the numbers were listed separately.
Why is this interesting?
I think this is another opportunity for people to help the perl community. Without the need of programming. People in the non-English communities could check the pages in the English version of wikipedia and see if a counterpart exists in their own language. They could include the CPAN links there.
There are still many links on Wikipedia that link to old versions of CPAN modules or to search pages within CPAN instead of specific page.
I blog about Perl.
Both search.cpan.org and metacpan.org support linking to the latest version of a distribution. And both support HTTP and HTTPS.
Example:
http://metacpan.org/release/Acme-Bleach
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-Bleach/
Which site the links are changed to is less important in my opinion than pointing to the latest release.
hanks for doing this. It's a real service.
FYI, from Reddit FAQ (emphasis mine):
Reading this yesterday from HN:
http://blog.jacius.info/2012/05/29/a-personal-lisp-crisis/?
I'm thinking it's nice that in Perl we have people like Gabor who take an active role in caring about the perception of Perl from the outside world.
From the blog: "[...]it would be also interesting to see subjects in Wikipedia that have implementations in Perl and linking to that implementation."
The last time I tried that, someone removed *all* the implementation links claiming "Wikipedia is not a code repository". I get the point, but sometimes having a link to some actual working code is useful. It's a very inconsistent standard.
Oh, and thank you very much for doing this. I have an edit queued up for after work.
Pointing to the latest release is indeed the most important thing here. Having said that, MetaCPAN really suffers in comparison to s.c.o. when it comes to inbound links. Changing some existing links to point to MetaCPAN should eventually help get more MetaCPAN searches at the top of Google results and that's a good thing, I think. Choice is important and it would be nice for people to have a choice between MetaCPAN and s.c.o. in more search results.
Since outbound Wikipedia links employ rel="nofollow", it's not going to help with SEO in this case, but it does expose people to another way to find Perl modules and that's a good thing. Once the number of links to MetaCPAN increases across other sites, the SEO situation should improve.
@Steven Haryanto, thanks for the quote! I always assumed those are real numbers. Now it is even more confusing what the readers of Reddit think :)
@Dana Jacobsen, for a long time I tried to avoid editing Wikipedia after one of my articles was deleted without warning in a very stupid way, but I am sure some other people can handle Wikipedia better than I do.
So I can totally see the situation you were in, but as I see from the list of pages I linked to, there are also plenty of pages with links to the implementations. Indeed very inconsistent standard.
SCO is quite ugly and I cannot see better reason to point to MetaCPAN :)
I'll do my best. Although fix all the Wikipedia will be difficult, according to the Spanish Wikipedia Perl doesn't have switch sentence... :(