Magnus' blog post today is a must-read for anyone in the GLAM community who
wants to understand why analytics has been such a challenge for us:
http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=173
Quoting the last three paragraphs in full:
[...]
Like others, I have tried to get the Foundation to provide the page view
data in a more accessible and local (as in
toolserver/Labs) way. Like
others, I failed. The last iteration was a video meeting with the Analytics
team (newly restarted, as the previous Analytics team didn't really work
out for a reason; I didn't inquire too deeply), which ended with a promise
to get this done Real Soon Now(tm), and the generous offer to use the page
view data from their hadoop cluster. Except the cluster turned out to be
empty; I then was encouraged to import the view data myself. (No, this is
not a joke. I have the emails to prove it.) As much as I enjoy working with
and around the Wikiverse, I do have neither the time, the bandwidth, nor
the inclination to do your paid jobs for you, thank you very much.
As the sophisticated reader might have picked up at this point, the entire
topic is rather frustrating for myself and others, and
being unable to
offer a patchy, error-prone data set to GLAMs who have released hundreds of
thousands of files under a free license into Commons is, quite frankly,
disgraceful. The requirement for the Foundation is not unreasonable;
providing what Henrik has been doing for years on his own would be quite
sufficient. Not even that is required; myself and others have volunteered
to write interfaces if the back-end data is provided in a usable form.
Of the tools I try to provide in the GLAM realm, some don't really work at
the moment due to the constraints described above;
some work so-so, kept
running with a significant amount of manual fixing. Adding 100.000 Wellcome
Trust images may be enough for them to come to a grinding halt. And when
all the institutions who so graciously have contributed free content to the
Wikiverse come a-running, I will make it perfectly clear that there is only
the Foundation to blame.
And as many of have said before, thanks to Magnus for doing as much as he
has been able to within current circumstances.
Dominic