[Wikimedia ZA] Wikipedia: statistics analysis

[Achal Prabhala]

This is likely to be a real problem in SA as much as India: see 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-September/000895.html

So it could be that (a) local internet connections from Telkom somehow 
bestow a non-SA IP address on your connection, and (b) that some folks 
accessing the internet from their workplace have IP addresses configured 
centrally, so it shows up as being from another country, both of which 
are complicated by the fact that (c) some overseas South Africans are 
also editing and reading from overseas.

What the statistics *don't* accurately tell us is the overall skew 
between SA-based users (editors and readers) and overseas users on 
Wikipedias in English and in any other South African language. A better 
gauge of local contribution might be the number of editors who 
self-identify as South African, and identify the languages they edit in. 
There are existing lists of SA Wikipedians, and it might be a good idea 
to popularise and populate them - as well as perhaps deepen them in 
terms of areas of interest? 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_in_South_Africa and 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:South_African_Wikipedians). When 
Kerryn and I last checked, they were quite dated.

What the statistics *do* tell us though is how African language 
Wikipedias within South Africa are doing (excluding English). Regardless 
of where the page views and edits are coming from, a summary of numbers 
is yet useful in terms of understanding the level of interest and the 
quantity of people involved. Of course, other statistics, such as these 
captured in a monthly report in India by Shiju Alex ( 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-June/000771.html 
), if developed in South Africa, for languages used locally excluding 
English, would provide an excellent analysis of where things are. If 
anyone here is interested in finding out how Shiju compiles his monthly 
updates, you can get in touch with him at shijualexonline at gmail, I'm 
sure he'd be happy to help. You might find it useful to have this 
additional statistical layer analysed and reported; especially for 
emerging language Wikipedias, the growth interest, pages, quality of 
pages, number of editors can be illuminating - and if things are well, 
also encouraging.

Cheers,
Achal



---

*Sarel Wessels (Agri Wiki)* swessels at agriwiki.co.za 
<mailto:wikimediaza%40lists.wikimedia.org?Subject=%5BWikimedia%20ZA%5D%20Wikipedia%3A%20statistics%20analysis&In-Reply-To=AANLkTinVNfraGo8UppXruGxupfbkQzgQFNLM2_9PK%2BVo%40mail.gmail.com>
/Thu Sep 9 11:30:26 UTC 2010/

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  At one stage, the log file of my website reported that I receive a lot 
of visitors from the USA...but all the time it were visitors from S.A. 
that uses the ADSL from Telkom... For some reason it were reported as 
from USA....can't it be the same reason perhaps?