Arjuna, Your approach to have an idea of a community's activity by combining some metrics is interesting. Also, to compare monthly averages instead of end of year performance is also good. *Increase in database size, number of most active contributors (making more than 100 edits a month) and page views can be real indicators of growth and activity*. Is there any way to find database size? We don't have that and many other useful stats after May 2010. Check http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaTA.htm for example. Also, any inference based on page views should normalize it based on the population of native speaking people to have a better perspective of the community's performance compared to its potential / size. Ravi

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 6:01 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala &lt;arjunaraoc(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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. -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay <https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>

On Jan 23, 2013 11:58 AM, "Arjuna Rao Chavala" &lt;arjunaraoc(a)gmail.com&gt; 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 &lt;foss.mailinglists(a)gmail.com&gt; On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 6:01 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala &lt;arjunaraoc(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: the and 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

There is a much better report is here <http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/analysis-of-the-indic-language-statistical-report-2012/>[1]and here <http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/indic-language-wikipedias-statistical-report-2012-2/>[2]by Shiju. 1. http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/analysis-of-the-indic-language-st… 2. http://shijualex.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/indic-language-wikipedias-statist… On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 5:23 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala &lt;arjunaraoc(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: