Chappaqua Tales #1
Chappaqua Tales #2: It's not every day that one is mistaken for a former Miss America

Clocking External Links on Wikipedia

I've found a fascinating, if sometimes very slow, tool on Wikipedia: the External links tool. It's probably what Certain People used when they attempted to de-link All Wikipedia from nielsenhayden.com. It's most common use seems to be for rooting out spam.

I've discovered that if you really try and are patient, it can be used to calculate the total number of links from Wikipedia to a given domain for domains with five- and six-figure numbers of outgoing links. I've determined (though patience and effort) that there are about 61,000 links from Wikipedia to the domain nytimes.com, but close to 147,000 to  wolfram.com (mostly because of the heavy use of MathWorld and ScienceWorld and what looks to be a very elaborate and perhaps difficult attempt to match up resources across websites with the purpose of making use of material on the target site on a large scale).

I am curious if there are other tools that work better for the purpose of evaluating Wikipedia's out-going links. (It seems to me that this is sort of like the reverse of the Wikipedia scanner.) Because of the Wikipedia no-follow policy, I presume that most external search engines are prohibited from collecting this kind of info and from giving this bit of transparency.

FURTHER COUNTS: a ranked list can be found HERE

(These numbers are all for en.wikipedia.org.)

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