Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-5014364-20161112215014

"Operation Bootstrap" is an ongoing initiative I'm launching into to fix up our most highly trafficked articles.

I said some years ago when we were redesigning the front page that we have to remember some principles I learned in library/archival training: fundamentally, you the Admins and veteran editors know where articles are, but new casual readers do not. This doesn't even mean editors, just the tends of thousands of people who only read them.

Thus the "access points" principle: people don't know where anything is inherently, and your navigation menus have to be able to branch out to someone stumbling blindly through it as they browse. This is also why inter-linking is so important.

Well, the problem is that the overwhelming number of casual readers don't find articles by going to the front page, but by googling the most popular articles.

People who do not even know what Game of Thrones Wiki is just type "Jon Snow" into Google, and we're literally at the top of the list (well, either that or we're second and the book wiki at Westeros.org's article on "Jon Snow" is number one; differs from one article to the next; either way we're consistently either the first or second).

Improving our front page navigation may help some new users and keep them attracted to the site, but the way we hook vast numbers of new readers is by improving the articles that casual readers stumbling into here from Google search are most likely to read.

It's not just that "it's embarrassing if our most popular/highly visited article" is bad -- it's that it's a major access point: casual google-searchers stumble onto the "Jon Snow" article....so that means the "Jon Snow" article has to be very well interlinked with other major sections and articles on the wiki.

All of this is actually pretty obvious if you just sit down to think about it. Yes, book readers will come on here to make edits about the Battle of the Whispering Wood as accurate as possible, but we need to grow, and the new recruits come in by reading the obvious articles like "Jon Snow".

'''Administrators have a special took feature which lets us see a list of the most popular articles on the wiki. These are the articles we must focus on.'''

Thus, "Operation Bootstrap" is "prioritize fixing up this list of the most highly visited articles, actively keeping in mind that people who have no idea what a wiki is and have never heard of ours are going to be reading it from google search, so make sure it is as well written and interlinked to other sections as possible". (For those who don't get the reference, it's a triage method, thus we're "pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps").

The most popular pages vary by season of course: in Season 1, "Robert Baratheon" might have been at the top but it's not by Season 6.

Generally, though, the most popular pages are all pretty obvious. But this is a formal list based on the wiki-tool that lets me actually measure this, as observed since Season 6 began. In roughly descending order of traffic volume:


 * Jon Snow
 * Rhaegar Targaryen
 * Lyanna Stark
 * Eddard Stark

Jon Snow is the most popular, Daenerys is the second, but other Jon Snow-parentage articles are near the top as well - it's conceptually easier to think of Rhaegar, Lyanna, and Eddard as outgrowths of the Jon Snow article - in fact I think many casual readers found the Rhaegar page through the Jon page. Continuing:


 * Daenerys Targaryen
 * Tyrion Lannister
 * Cersei Lannister
 * Jaime Lannister

Unsurprisingly, the top five articles are the character pages for what I call "the Big 5" - officially defined as "Tier A" cast members according to the revised salary scheme the studio worked out in Season 5, and they're all what you'd consider the core characters, not just in terms of screentime but in terms of POV chapters each gets in the novels: Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion, Cersei, Jaime. And they're main characters for a reason; they shape much of the plot, this is obvious. Moving down the list:


 * Arya Stark
 * Sansa Stark
 * Bran Stark
 * Ramsay Bolton
 * Gregor Clegane
 * Sandor Clegane
 * Theon Greyjoy
 * Yara Greyjoy
 * Euron Greyjoy

Bran and the Greyjoys weren't very high ranking before Season 6, understandably, but shot back up to importance after being featured so much in Season 6. Really the list is a combination of major longrunning characters, plus a few who were immediately really important in the most recent season. I'm not sure why Gregor Clegane is ranked so highly - maybe a lot of people confused about exactly what happened to him.

Then we run into the overall "House" pages, which describe groups of characters. Again these basically just line up with the characters already listed:


 * House Stark
 * House Targaryen
 * House Lannister
 * House Greyjoy
 * House Tyrell


 * Season 7 - goes without saying that everyone checks this for news of an upcoming season

Then there are a few loose ends who are frequently visited because they're old favorites (Joffrey) or did something in the most recent season (Melisandre's age and Lyanna Mormont):


 * Melisandre
 * Joffrey Baratheon
 * Margaery Tyrell
 * Lyanna Mormont


 * White Walkers
 * Gendry - he shot up again once news broke he'd be returning in Season 7

Otherwise, there are many popular character in the TV show, but those such as even "Brienne of Tarth", "Varys", "Littlefinger", or "Walder Frey" didn't actually make the cut.

In descending order, these are the articles we need to prioritize the most and make sure they're the best on the entire wiki by Season 7, hopefully sooner.
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