[Commons-l] Institutional stats reports

[David Monniaux]

Dear Greg,

I cannot agree more with you: raw statistics such as page counts or 
links do not take into account the fact that such or such picture was 
really helpful to some category of users. (I may sound elitist, but I 
gladly prefer to witness that some student is able to get content on, 
say, history or science, than a thousand people going to see the latest 
news on some worthless TV persona.)

Funding agencies like numbers. In the scientific fields, this has lead 
to so-called "bibliometrics", and, unsurprisingly, to various strategies 
meant to raise these metrics, often at the expense of the best interests 
of science.

One reason while funding providers, and their management (in fine, 
answerable to politicians in the case of public agencies, and 
businesspeople in the case of private fundations) like number is that 
they give an illusion of objectivity, and they are easier to obtain than 
human evaluations.

Unfortunately, we have to make do with these quirks. Scientists watch 
their h-index, and museums want to know whether their images get hits. 
We should provide them with this data if we can.

Regards
DM