I was a bit irritated yesterday to learn that we can automate the
creation of Limn graphs and speed up the process.
I had become so tired of manually copying and pasting existing graphs
and manually editing them to work for a new graph that I knocked up a
script to do this for me. The script simply took an SQL query and the
config file and generates all the necessary JSON files for it so that
it shows up on the Limn dashboard.
With this script I was able to generate 5 graphs in the time it takes
me to generate 1.
However since uploading the script [1] I have now learnt other scripts
like this exist. Please can we standardise on a way to generate these
graphs (either locally or on the server) and detail it in the README
to make this whole process of graph generation nicer for everyone
involved?
I've added some graphs (which should update soon) that show activity
in the left navigation menu, on the watchlist page and on the diff
page. We had this data so it seemed silly not to display it somewhere.
When the data becomes available you'll notice that interestingly
'Home' link in the main menu is our most widely used feature. It will
be great to see how that changes when search becomes available on
special pages. Likewise random is a very widely used feature - we
should continue experimenting with that and try and use it to engage
new editors.
[1]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110271/2/generate-graph.py
[2]
http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/#other-graphs-tab