[Foundation-l] It's not article count, it's editors

[teun spaans]

There are a lot of metrics which could be defined, and each has its own
merits:
* number of articles: an indication of the amount of subjects covered, and
for "completeness" of the topics covered. More articles will probably draw
more visitors.
* number of participants: probably an indication of potential growth
* number of new articles / month : current growth
* Number of articles * length: a better indication of the amount of
information available.
* Number of corrections / article: probably an indication of quality, but
might also be an indication of vandalism.
* Turnover rate in the number of active editors might be an excellent
indication of a communities health. If the group is stable, but new editors
quickly disappear that is a strong indication that the group is nt very open
to newbies.
That is just a short list Erik suggested valuable metrics.
It would be nice of every community for its homepage could choose from a
list of these metrics, instead of just the article count.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/9/22 Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com>:
> > My own personal view is that, in an ideal world, we'd post two or more
> > metrics for every project (article numbers, number of editors, and
> perhaps
> > other metrics like, perhaps, external links).  That would create a design
> > problem given our current home page, but probably not an unsolvable one.
> >
> > The idea here is that, with multiple metrics, we can hypothesize more
> > clearly about trends -- e.g., when the article number rate of increase
> > declines, but numbers of editors and external links increases, we may be
> > able to make some more reasonable guesses about what's happening on that
> > project.
> >
> > Obviously, Erik Zachte's work in this are is extremely (I'm inclined to
> say
> > uniquely) valuable -- I'm wondering how we can better integrate his
> research
> > into how the projects initially represent themselves to users upon entry.
>
> I don't know if we necessarily need multiple metrics on the home page,
> but we certainly should be considering multiple metrics. To move from
> just considering article counts to just considering participants to
> population ratios would be a very bad idea. Do we have an expert
> statistician around that can do some regression testing, or similar,
> and work out what the real relationships are between these various
> metrics? For examples, what kind of correlation is there actually
> between number of participants and article creation rates? Does that
> correlation vary for different sized Wikipedias (and for other
> projects)? Etc. etc.
>
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