SO the thing to do while waiting for yuletide assignments to go out, apparently, is statistics.

(Have I mentioned lately that I love fandom?)

And since I requested dreamwidth/fandom fic, I thought I'd run some numbers on Dreamwidth and fandom. I moved here at beta, and settled in pretty quickly, and it's been really hard, from my cozy little spot here among you all, to tell what actually *was* going on, in respect to fandom moving here.

But when I was going through all the Dear Writer posts being linked in the yuletide community over at lj, I kept noticing that there were actually quite a *lot* of people who were linking their letters from their DW accounts instead of their LJs, and I was wondering if there really were a lot, or if it was an illusion based around what I wanted, and was expecting, to see. And then it occurred to me that this might actually be a pretty good metric of how fandom actually *is* moving: yuletide participation is probably as close as we can get to a real cross-section of people who are active in the sort of fandom that is on journal sites, and it seems like the site people link in their letters would be the site they consider their primary home, regardless of whether they crosspost and how.

So, since I was looking at them all anyway, I starting tallying which sites they were each on. And then I gave in and took a more-or-less proper random sample.

( The Procedure! )

( The Results! )

( The Analysis! )

( The Raw data! )

And, of course, the other thing that became inescapable is people really *suck* at writing accessible link text. Opera (my browser of choice - which btw worked perfectly with both yuletide signup & ao3, unlike other browsers I can name) has a built-in tool that will pull out all the links in a page, sort them by either text, location, or url, and let you do various things with them. It is very useful; I use it a lot around this time of year, in fact, because I can download large amounts of fic from index posts very quickly in order to read offline.

I am so glad I don't have to use something similar all the time, like people with vision, processing, or dexterity impairments often do. I'm not always perfect with writing useful link text, but I'm trying to remember to be better; someone on my reading page recently linked to a survey saying uninformative link text is the #1 internet accessibility issue, and I believe it now. I didn't run as strict statistics here, but the Opera tool made it very easy to run rough numbers: guess, on average, how many fans out of 25 on a page used link text that actually gives any useful information out of context. Go on, guess!

Something like 80% use some direct variation on "here". Nearly all the rest are something equally unhelpful, along the lines of "My letter" or "Dear Writer" or "on my journal", with a few that are just bare urls with no link text at all, and maybe, if you're lucky, *one* per page that actually says something like "fanwriter1's letter" or "fandom 1, fandom 2, fandom 3" that would actually maybe let someone identify it out of context.

I knew link text was a problem: I'd just never quite been smacked in the face with just *how* useless so much of it is. Put something in your link text that will let people identify it out of context, folks!