Ian Baker wrote:
Basically, I'd like to publish per-editor pageview
stats. That is,
Mediawiki would keep track of the number of times an article had been viewed
since the first day you edited it, and let you know how many times your
edits had been seen (approximately, depending on the resolution of the
data). I think such personalized stats could really help to drive editor
retention. The information is available now through Henrik's tool, but
even if you know about stats.grok.se, it's hard to keep track and make the
connection between the graphs there and one's own contributions.
This is a neat idea. MediaWiki has some page view count support built in,
but it's been disabled on Wikimedia wikis for pretty much forever. The
reality is that MediaWiki isn't launched for the vast majority of requests.
A user making an edit is obviously different, though. I think a database
with per-day view support would make this feature somewhat feasible, in a
JavaScript gadget or in a MediaWiki extension.
Are there other specific projects that require this
data? It will be much
easier to make a case for accelerating development of the dataset if there
are some clear examples of where it's needed, and especially if it can help
to meet the current editor retention goals.
Heh. It's refreshing to hear this said aloud. Yes, if there were some way to
tie page view stats to fundraising/editor retention/usability/the gender
gap/the Global South, it'd be much simpler to get resources devoted to it.
Without a doubt.
There are countless applications for this data, particularly as a means of
measuring Wikipedia's impact. This data also provides a scale against which
other articles and projects can be measured. In a vacuum, knowing that the
English Wikipedia's article "John Doe" received 400 views per day on
average
in June means very little. When you can compare that figure to the average
views per day of every other article on the English Wikipedia (or every
other article on the German Wikipedia), you can begin doing real analysis
work. Currently, this really isn't possible, and that's a Bad Thing.
MZMcBride