On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 8:35 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Excellent! There's some wording on this page that caused me to be a
little timid about this:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
"Internal Wikimedia matters, discussions of new projects and similar
threads should be kept off the list."
This is arguably an "internal Wikimedia matter", but I suspect that
wording was written long ago, and could use some tuning and
clarification.
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?
Not yet. We've discussed how to make this possible, but I think
there's a lot of work left to do to make this a reality. We'd need to
make sure of a couple of things:
1. That the only thing we're providing is a fully sanitized view of the data
2. That any user interface that we expose via public web page go
through much more rigorous security review
For the first item, it's worth discussing on one of the OWA mailing lists:
http://wiki.openwebanalytics.com/index.php?title=Support
I'll also make Peter aware of this thread so he knows what's going on.
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 :-)
By all means. I'm wondering what the most sensible way to organize
and vet all of the community wishlist issues. What I'd like to do is
make sure we have a bulleted summary or a query somewhere that we can
march through during the meetings we have at WMF about priority
setting. If it's buried in an email thread, it's going to get lost.
Where do you think is the most sensible place to ask people to put
these requests that works for everyone?
Rob