Summary: we have some new stats regarding gadget usage across WMF sites, but I'd like more analysis of gadget & bot usage.
Oliver Keyes has some code and results up at https://github.com/Ironholds/MetaAnalysis/tree/master/GadgetUsage to analyze "data around gadgets being used on various wikimedia projects":
"GadgetUsage.r is the generation script. It is dependent on (a) access to the analytics slaves and (b) the list of databases
"gadget_data.tsv is the raw data, consisting of an aggregate number of users for each preference on each wiki, with preference, wiki and wiki type (source, wiki, versity, etc) defined.
"gadgets_by_wikis.tsv is a rework of the data to look at what gadgets are used on multiple wikis, and how many wikis that is. It also includes an aggregate of the number of users across those wikis using the gadget.
"wikis_by_gadgets.tsv is a rework that looks at the number of distinct gadgets on each individual wiki. Unsuprisingly there's a power law."
This helps a lot with addressing one of the analytics "dreams" from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Dreams - "What proportion of logged-in editors have activated any gadgets at all? What are the most popular gadgets?" However, Oliver's data "is based on preference data - it may or may not include data for those gadgets set as defaults." So if someone could improve this to ensure that we appropriately count gadget usage for gadgets that default to on, that would be very helpful.
My team would also like to know: * who maintains the most popular gadgets? (so we can invite them to hackathons, help get them training, get those gadgets localised and ported to other wikis, and so on) * when were the gadgets last updated? (so we can identify stale ones that enthusiastic volunteers could take over maintaining) * similar stats regarding bot usage -- what bots are making the most edits, or edits that in aggregate change the most bytes? who owns those bots? what wikis are they active on? (so we can help maintainers better, ensure they hear about API breaking changes, etc., and develop a bot inventory/directory to make it easier for other wikis' users to start using useful bots)
If there's anyone interested in taking this on, either inside or outside WMF's Analytics team, that would be great. Otherwise I anticipate that Engineering Community Team will take it on sometime in the October-December 2013 period.