There are a lot of metrics which could be defined, and each has its own
merits:
* number of articles: an indication of the amount of subjects covered, and
for "completeness" of the topics covered. More articles will probably draw
more visitors.
* number of participants: probably an indication of potential growth
* number of new articles / month : current growth
* Number of articles * length: a better indication of the amount of
information available.
* Number of corrections / article: probably an indication of quality, but
might also be an indication of vandalism.
* Turnover rate in the number of active editors might be an excellent
indication of a communities health. If the group is stable, but new editors
quickly disappear that is a strong indication that the group is nt very open
to newbies.
That is just a short list Erik suggested valuable metrics.
It would be nice of every community for its homepage could choose from a
list of these metrics, instead of just the article count.
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
2009/9/22 Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)gmail.com>om>:
My own personal view is that, in an ideal world,
we'd post two or more
metrics for every project (article numbers, number of editors, and
perhaps
other metrics like, perhaps, external links).
That would create a design
problem given our current home page, but probably not an unsolvable one.
The idea here is that, with multiple metrics, we can hypothesize more
clearly about trends -- e.g., when the article number rate of increase
declines, but numbers of editors and external links increases, we may be
able to make some more reasonable guesses about what's happening on that
project.
Obviously, Erik Zachte's work in this are is extremely (I'm inclined to
say
uniquely) valuable -- I'm wondering how we
can better integrate his
research
into how the projects initially represent
themselves to users upon entry.
I don't know if we necessarily need multiple metrics on the home page,
but we certainly should be considering multiple metrics. To move from
just considering article counts to just considering participants to
population ratios would be a very bad idea. Do we have an expert
statistician around that can do some regression testing, or similar,
and work out what the real relationships are between these various
metrics? For examples, what kind of correlation is there actually
between number of participants and article creation rates? Does that
correlation vary for different sized Wikipedias (and for other
projects)? Etc. etc.
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