Hi Rob,
For one, I'm super pleased that we're taking a wholistic approach to
improving the analytics on WMF project. I have been hoping that we
make it easier to extract x, y or z stats/metrics on an ad hoc basis,
but to actually get proper analytics built right in is a giant leap
beyond what I thought was possible.
And secondly, as far as I'm personally concerned, this research-l
mailing list would seem an appropriate place to host discussions about
the analytics project in the manner in which you described.
One question: as I understand it, one of the key priorities of this
analytics project is the installation of OpenWebAnalytics (which
AFAICT will be similar to GoogleAnalytics but open source and also
compliant with the WMF's stringent privacy policy). If so, will the
full array of anonymised analytics be visible to everyone live, or
will the results be released in a summarised format on a regular
basis? That is, will the public/wikimedians/press be able to see the
same thing that the WMF can see and at the same time?
Finally, if I may just throw in a little request to the "wishlist" -
one thing that GLAM partners would really like to be able to do is
easily produce for themselves a "report card" of their organisation's
relationship to Wikimedia over time. Currently, we make do with
producing ad hoc stats for them based maingly on magnus' tools
(especially baGLAMa and GLAMorous) and other things like
linkypedia.inkdroid.org . It would be brilliant if a GLAM partner
could quickly and easily produce a *pretty* report that showed how
their images were being used (number of usages, number of views...),
how our external links to their site were used (most popular referral
paths, total traffic, most linked-from categories...) and how articles
about things relate to them are used (quality improvement over time,
combined pageviews for categories important to them...). Ideally, if
this could generate into a report fit to show to senior management, I
suspect that we would have much greater success with enticing more
GLAMs to move towards free-culture. All "whishlist" stuff I know, but
I thought I might as well ask :-)
-Liam / witty lama
--
On 07/01/2011, Rob Lanphier <robla@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've only posted once before here, and didn't do much of an intro back
> then, so let me do one now. I'm the Program Manager for General
> Engineering at Wikimedia Foundation, which is the slice of the WMF
> Engineering organization that does infrastructure-related software
> development. One piece we're responsible for is the analytics
> infrastructure.
>
> We're in the process of planning our software development for
> analytics for the coming months, so we've had a few conversations, and
> Howie Fung and I spent some time planning and writing up our thoughts
> on feature prioritization here:
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Analytics/Feature_prioritization
>
> This is a really rough cut, and something we haven't fully discussed
> within the Foundation, so don't take this as something that is coming
> down from on high. There are some things on the list that are well
> underway, but many things are things we're just getting started on.
>
> Barring any objections here, we'd like to use this mailing list as our
> primary venue for discussing general prioritization of analytics
> features. We know we need a place that we can tell WMF employees to
> subscribe if they're interested in this stuff, and nothing we're
> discussing should be confidential. Rather than starting a new mailing
> list, we'd like to try using this list for a bit (in combination with
> relevant talk pages on documents referenced here). If it turns out
> we're generating enough traffic to warrant splitting off or if this
> list isn't working out for whatever reason, we'll figure out some
> alternate plan.
>
> While we suspect that many of the details will be of specific interest
> to Foundation employees (who are relying on much of this information
> to perform their jobs effectively), we also know there is plenty of
> general interest in this work. Please feel free to share your
> thoughts.
>
> Thanks!
> Rob
>
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> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
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