On Jan 23, 2013 11:58 AM, "Arjuna Rao Chavala" <arjunaraoc@gmail.com> wrote:

Rather than just the views, we need to look at the value felt by the viewers (may be by an annual survey) as a measure of the impact of Wikipedia's mission. In the absence of such a measure, we are looking at Page views as an outcome. As page views itself may depend upon edits and several other factors and influence other factors, I have considered it as an input itself, as it is an important contributor to the activity.

There can be several ways to compute the quality of the Wikipedia. But that is a different topic.

Cheers
Arjuna

That is a very challenging thought, Arjuna. Online surveys are potentially quite weak, as evidenced by the Facebook voting process (for policy changes, not the Facebook 'like' feature, whose purpose itself is full of questions).

A possibility may be a continuous rating system, with radio buttons on each page, visible to logged in users (?), or actionable only by logged in users, rather than an optionable survey on some other page. I see difficulties with this as well, mind you, but throw it out as a suggestion.

On the plus side, adding such user-involving features may be a way to bring in more 'mature' community involvement in knowledge creation and dissemination. I am often struck by the manner in which some relatively half-baked 'improvement' gets to be quite popular while worthwhile technology lies unused. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings', said the poet, but I hope we are part of the solution, not content to remain the problem.

Somewhere in the future, I see some kind of 'sharing' as a possibility, whereby individuals who have common interests can actively and dynamically connect through wikipedia pages. That might throw up an interesting metric as well.

--
Vickram
Fool On The Hill
"The cameras were all around. We've got you taped; you're in the play. 
Here's your I.D. (Ideal for identifying one and all.) 
Invest your life in the memory bank; ours the interest and we thank you."
Jethro Tull: A Passion Play (1973)

2013/1/22 sankarshan <foss.mailinglists@gmail.com>
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 6:01 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala
<arjunaraoc@gmail.com> wrote:
> Both are key measures of activity for the outcome of Wikipedia, that is
> sharing the sum of human knowledge. If there are not many page views
> resulting from less number of readers, there will be less enthusiasm on the
> part of Editors to contribute. If there are more page views, more people
> will be interested to become Editors. Given the nature of these metrics and
> different ranges, each one will not be a reliable measure by itself as  it
> is the interaction  in the Wikipedia eco-system that will be a more
> appropriate measure. I also  heard during some of wiki interactions that
> when Chinese language wikipedia was banned in China, the number of editors
> fell a lot.

When I realized that "Activity" is a product of the entities I
understood that the two entities are commutative. However, there was a
particular aspect which puzzled me - the number of views/viewers is a
function of the richness of the content. In other words, while that
value can certainly be influenced by the language community, it cannot
be controlled. Against that, the number of edits is a value that is
under the sphere of control of a language community. And, within that,
edits can perhaps be classified (in context of whether the data
available facilitates that deep dive) as : human and bots. Within the
human-edited subset, there are ways to visualize the trend of data
edits. Kiran did a bit of this way back -
<http://jace.zaiki.in/tag/mwclient>

TL;DR : the measure of activity could perhaps be accurately reflected
when specific data points around editing are considered rather than
using a relationship with views.

Rather than just the views, we need to look at the value felt by the viewers (may be by an annual survey) as a measure of the impact of Wikipedia's mission. In the absence of such a measure, we are looking at Page views as an outcome. As page views itself may depend upon edits and several other factors and influence other factors, I have considered it as an input itself, as it is an important contributor to the activity.

There can be several ways to compute the quality of the Wikipedia. But that is a different topic.

Cheers
Arjuna

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