Dear Wikimedia Analytics team,

 

My name is Albrecht Wirthmann. I am working in a task team Big Data at Eurostat. This is the European statistical office, which makes part of the European Commission. The task team is exploring new data sources  for their feasibility of producing official statistics. We have been looking at various internet data sources including Wikimedia. The idea that we are currently following up is identifying Wikipedia pages in English that are referring to World Heritage sites and to analyse the number and development of page views of those pages as an indicator of exposure to culture. For this purpose we downloaded the page views files from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/.  The data should be later on included in a pocket book showing statistics on culture in the European Union.

 

I am contacting you to make you aware of our intentions, to ask if there would be any concerns related to our project and to possibly have a chat with you and your team to ask some technical questions and about the possibility of getting some additional data. We would be interested in page hits by country in order to be more specific on the statistics that we would compile.

 

We would be very glad about a positive reply and remain at your disposal,

 

Kind regards,

 

Albrecht Wirthmann