This is actually a very interesting post from David Shankbone. I like how a front-page WP image of his brought in an extra two visitors to his blog. My experience with Wikipedia inbound traffic is that you have to be more controversial, banned, and making trouble on WP before the Wikipediots will actually click through to your site to learn more about you.

I think he's right; Wikipedia is fantastic at driving traffic around between its own pages (that is, someone who visits one Wikipedia page will generally click-through to others), but it's a walled garden which doesn't generate much outbound traffic. I'd imagine MWB is the same.

Speaking of Shanker's blog, one of his other posts there has prompted a very impressive conspiracy-theorist nutjob reply.

On Wikipedia's recent mention in the Signpost drove about 200 click-throughs (presumably there were more as some people's browsers don't give the referring URL), so this isn't universally true. We're very happy for the traffic, of course, but a fact still remains that a lot of people look at the signpost and a very small percentage of them clicked through to our site. Now, on the other hand, when I bring up one of our posts with a link here at Wikipedia Review, a much higher percentage of people who read the thread click on the link. Still, Wikipedia can drive traffic your way.

The same, in that we don't get much traffic from Wikipedia, or that we don't send much traffic outside our walls?

For the former, I would say that WP sends MWB about 5 to 10 visitors a day, out of about 1,200.

For the latter, I would say that out of the 1,200 daily visitors, about 15 leave MWB through an ad link, about 35 leave via an external link to another site put there by an editor, and about 1,150 click "back" or "close" on their browser. Still, though, consider the following... one of our pages features a friend's heating oil company. They get about one new customer a month who mentions that they found them on "a wiki" or "the wiki". Since Wikipedia Review is the only wiki containing their info, they know it's MWB sending them that phone call. A new customer might be good for $1,000 to $1,500 in a heating season. So, was it worth it to them to have me create their page? They'd say so.

Does no Wikipedian see a problem with Shankbone complaining that his self-promotion does not work? Why is Paypal pan handling wrong and this OK?

My main thought was "who ever cares about who took a picture?" - they are just there. That guy seriously overrates the stature of photographers with the public, especially photographers in a skanky effort like Wikipedia.

In similar vein, can anyone name the top Hollywood camera operator, who after all must be a key component in fulfilling a director's dreams? It simply is not something that is rated.

I'm sure Shankbone would have had more hits if clicking on the image took you directly to his site. Perhaps someone ought to propose that?

As it stands, clicking on the image takes you to the image details page which has two links to Shankbone's blog's main page and one link to a specific blog post. In the caption used on Salman Rushdie's article, Shankbone has also taken the opportunity to namecheck Amos Oz and the breakfast fete likely organised by David Saranga.