[Foundation-l] Re: wikistats (was Information flow)

[Jakob Voss]

Cormac Lawler wrote:

>> Collecting statistics from full database dumps is a slow and heavy 
>> process.  We could do better.  But only if we know which stats to 
>> collect.

Most statistics can be created out of the database dumps but first you 
have to know how to get it, where to put it and how to treat it.
I have updated http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Export but you still 
need some hardware and programming skills.

> Having these counts in MediaWiki would be great, and not just for 
> researchers. Of general use, apart from "What links here" would be 
> User contributions and Recent Changes - if recent changes can be 
> selected by in the last 1,3,7...days, couldn't they be counted 
> automatically?
> 
> I'm not sure how generally useful (or possible) it would be to count 
> other more specific things like, say, number of times this user has 
> edited this article, but above are my top three.

You can already get a counter of user contributions with Kate's tool.
http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~kate/cgi-bin/count_edits.cgi

A simple counter for "What links here"  (= number of inlinks) would be 
nice and easy to implement.

A dump of the Recent Changes (RSS) in the last 1 and 7 days is heavily 
needed for research.

Full user contributions can be exported with scripts parsing HTML 
(Python Robot framework) but of course a XML export format would be nice 
too.

Greetings,
Jakob