[Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies

[Alex]

Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> Installing Google Analytics, even for our own purposes, is a bad idea.  
> For one, it creates a link to google that is not necessarily what we  
> want; it would be a big target for people to try and hack, and it  
> presents tempting security risks on Google's end.  Not to mention, as  
> far as I know the program is proprietary.
> 
> If we're going to do something like this, it should be open source,  
> and it should something that we can internally install and monitor  
> without external options. That is, again, assuming we do something  
> like that. That's not a foregone presumption. I'm not convinced that  
> we need to be tracking user behavior at this point in time, or that  
> the tradeoffs for doing so are worth any benefits, or that doing so is  
> in furtherance of our mission.
> 

The plain pageview stats are already available.
Erik Zachte has been doing some work on other stats.
<http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/VisitorsSampledLogRequests.htm>

If I were to compile a wishlist of stats things:

1. stats.grok.se data for non-Wikipedia projects
2. A better interface for stats.wikimedia.org - There's a lot of data
there, but it can be hard to find it and its not very publicized. The
only reason I knew about the link above is because someone pointed it
out to me once and I bookmarked it.
3. Pageview stats at <http://dammit.lt/wikistats/> in files based on
projects. It would be a lot easier for people at the West Flemish
Wikipedia to analyze statistics themselves if they didn't have to
download tons of data they don't need.

-- 
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)