Saw it on foundation-l; thanks for cross-posting.
I think this is a great decision---what you can't measure, you can't manage, as the old adage goes.
I would like to suggest that Erik view his job not only as a statistician but also as a research outreach person. WikiSym has been growing at a healthy 25%/year rate in terms of publications, the quality has been increasing significantly. Quantitative research into Wikipedia plays a major role. I very much would like to see a continuation of Jakob's and Angela's 2006 workshop on research into Wikipedia.
On that note, maybe someone (from the board?) can clarify for us the role that research plays for the WMF. I've kind of lost track of the meaning of the changes from Erik M through James to Gregory now, I believe?
Thanks, Dirk
Cormac Lawler wrote:
Forwarding whole message...
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Brion Vibber* <brion@wikimedia.org mailto:brion@wikimedia.org> Date: Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 1:18 AM Subject: [Foundation-l] Announcement: Erik Zachte, Data Analyst To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org mailto:foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
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It is with great pleasure that I welcome Erik Zachte as a part-time contractor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Erik will start work with us officially on September 1.
Erik has worked as a Technical Analyst for Air France - KLM for more than two decades. He is probably most famous in the Wikimedia community as the developer of "WikiStats" (stats.wikimedia.org http://stats.wikimedia.org), an amazing statistics package that reveals data about the growth and editing patterns in our various wiki projects.
Erik has created many other wonderful tools, featured at http://infodisiac.com/ . In his part-time role with the Wikimedia Foundation, he will continue to maintain and develop code to provide critical operational metrics about our projects. A key first project, for example, will be the integration of traffic statistics into the WikiStats package. These metrics will be key to communications, fundraising, internal evaluation, and for many other purposes.
We're working in parallel to provide Erik with the support he needs to do his work, including more regularly provisioned dumps and hardware to run his scripts.
I'm very pleased that Erik is joining our team, and look forward to working with him. Please join me in welcoming him. :)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org http://wikimedia.org)
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