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