Is there a rival to Wikipedia?

Is there a relationship between the attributes of a Wikipedia page and the number of pageviews it gets, holding the topic of the Wikipedia page constant?

• For instance, if I take an existing Wikipedia page and double its length by adding new content, and/or improve the references and citations, is the page likely to get more views? Obviously, longer and more detailed pages tend to have more pageviews because of the confounding factor that more important subjects tend to both get more pageviews and have longer pages (see ). I'm deliberately holding the confounding factor constant here. The following considerations are relevant: (a) Do Google and other search engines consider the length and quality of Wikipedia pages directly when ranking them? (b) Do people linking to Wikipedia pages consider the length and quality of the Wikipedia page when deciding whether to link to them? If so, to what extent? (Many people just link to Wikipedia as "some canonical reference" without necessarily even reading the Wikipedia page, but others may link to it because they want to draw attention to specific content in the page).

• Answer:

  One attribute or factor may be the extent to which a Wikipedia article is linked from other pages within Wikipedia. I occasionally come across articles that are identified as "orphans" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Orphan) with no or few pages linking to them from elsewhere in Wikipedia. Orphaned articles are usually found only by searching, or by chance. In my experience, they are often on obscure or specialist subjects, and the editor may not have considered links to it from related articles. If I think it needs wider linking, I may look for related topics in Wikipedia that mention the subject but don't link to it, or examine any links in the 'orphan' and see if a reciprocal link from that destination article would be appropriate.