Did you know that "No original research" is one of Wikipedia's core principles? In a nutshell, Wikipedia does not publish original thought. All material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source.
This is where your repository comes in and underlines why repositories are so valuable for Wikipedia. This is especially true for repositories that succeed in providing permanent urls for the content they host. The content, stored in repositories, acts as a knowledge and reference backbone for the world's most successful encyclopedia.
This article shows how you can identify links from wikipedia sites to your repository. Equipped with the knowledge of which pages on wikipedia, link to which pages in your repository, you can then actively assist in maintaining these links.
Tutorial video
External links search
For this usecase, the special page called "External links search", is the gateway you need:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?target=&title=Special%3ALinkSearch or shorter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:LinkSearch
On this page, you can enter the url of your repository to identify pages on Wikipedia that link to your repository content.
If you enter the domain without http:// or https:// the tool implicitly assumes you are searching with http://
So for repositories hosted under https://, always remember to add this in front.
Scope limited to a particular language
The External links search url that was shared earlier in this article, exclusively searches the English wikipedia. To search instances of Wikipedia in other languages, just copy the path /w/index.php?target=&title=Special%3ALinkSearch or /wiki/Special:LinkSearch in any Wikipedia instance of choice, and it should redirect you to the right place.
For example:
- Spanish: https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Especial:B%C3%BAsquedaDeEnlaces&target=
- French: https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sp%C3%A9cial:Recherche_de_lien&target=
- Dutch: https://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Speciaal:VerwijzingenZoeken&target=
- German: https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spezial:Weblinksuche&target=
- ...
Search for current and old repository urls
If your repository was ever hosted under a different domain name, it's worth searching for the old domain names as well, as this might uncover links that need to be updated.
BONUS: Wikipedia and SEO
A question that often comes up is: will more links from Wikipedia to my repository pages give us higher positions in search indexes like Google and Google Scholar?
In short, the answer is no. Wikipedia adds the "nofollow" attribute on outgoing links. As a result, search engines ignore links from Wikipedia when calculating pagerank.
Read more about this here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
Need help?
The Atmire team can help you out with all kinds of DSpace related questions. We are eager to find out what we can do to improve your repository. Contact us today.