So what do you guys need for us to get good full-history dumps of en:wp?

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com Date: 9 Oct 2007 03:18 Subject: [Foundation-l] Database dumps and statistics To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org

The Foundation needs to put a higher priority on numerical metrics, and the database dumps from which they are derived.

We see the consequences of neglecting regular enwiki dumps in the academic studies that come out about Wikipedia. The most recent study, "<a href="http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf">Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia</a>", used year-old data (the same dump used by the last several studies). This greatly limits the relevance of the results, given how much English Wikipedia has changed in the last year.

Erik Zachte hasn't been able to provide updated statistics for enwiki since last October. Understanding the up-to-date structure of the editing community, especially in conjunction with the increasingly sophisticated analyses that computer scientists are producing, can be a great asset for Wikimedians trying to manage the problems of scale that projects are now facing. But without good, recent statistics, we lose the opportunity to take full advantage of such research.

The fact that the study above relied on specially-requested log data to calculate per-page view rates is even more troubling; article hit counters are desperately needed. One benefit of hit counts, among many, is to entice experts to edit by showing them just how many people read the (possibly sub-par) articles related to their expertise. Demonstrating the readership levels of important political and public policy topics would also be helpful in grant application. Greg Maxwell informs me that he has written a hit counting tool that (unlike the standard MediaWiki counter) could be enabling without a detrimental performance hit. I hope this can be implemented as soon as possible.

Yours in discourse, Sage (User:Ragesoss)

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