Thanks for looping me in Anna. The post was actually written by one of our volunteers in Egypt, so I can't take credit here. We use "bytes" because that's how edits are measured on mediawiki and on wikimetrics. Bytes themselves can be rather meaningless, but give us an indication about the size of an edit, or more generally, about student activity. We also can convert bytes into more meaningful measurements like words and printed page equivalents. Since Arabic script is more complex than Latin script, we divide the raw byte total in half and then divide that by 4.5 for average word count; we divide the raw total by 2 and again by 1,500 to get the printed page equivalent (or simply divide the raw number by 3,000 if just looking at Arabic script bytes). In the context of the Wikipedia Education Program, we have reported out on bytes but always try to give context to that number. The 7 million number is meaningful term-over-term to show activity (and students in Egypt monitor number of bytes to see who the top contributors are, so it has meaning locally in some sense), but may be more meaningful if converted to: * 2435 pages * 4.9 reams of paper * 811,806 words Hope that helps! Tighe -- Tighe Flanagan Manager, Wikipedia Education Program Wikimedia Foundation +1.415.839.6885 x6880 tflanagan(a)wikimedia.org education.wikimedia.org On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 9:57 AM, Anna Koval <akoval(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: