[Commons-l] Institutional stats reports

[Andrew Gray]

2008/7/2 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:

> But at the same time we don't want to further the belief that views
> directly relate to value.  Providing the right image to the right
> person has a lot more value than simply showing an image to lots and
> lots of people.
>
> When an image is placed in some obscure Wikipedia article it might not
> get a lot of page views, but when it is seen it is probably of
> substantial interest and value, far more so than yet-another-image
> scrolling by in a flickr feed.

Thing is, these institutions - and by extension the people wanting
these figures - don't themselves desperately believe that views relate
to value. (Ask a librarian about how meaningful they think their
circulation figures are as a metric!)

But they *are* impressive. They are, for want of anything better, a
first step as evidence that something is being used at all. They're a
number you can quote and wave around and put in your reports and your
funding requests and your cheerful press releases.

When it boils down to it, we're helping people play the game in order
that they can give us better content, and if we need to do vaguely
pointless things in order to do so, I say go for it :-)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
 andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk