Thursday, February 25, 2010

#buzz; Erik buzzed about the new scorecard, Luca challenges us to reply

Erik Moeller buzzed to indicate the latest scorecard statistics. Luca de Alfaro challenged the people who follow Erik on Buzz ....

People! Here you have the deputy director of Wikipedia, himself, posting an incredible gold mine of statistics on the Wikipedia, one of the top-10, most famous, most breakthrough websites ever. Statistics you can only dream for for the other top 10, as those are commercial sites that would never ever even consider publishing one thousandth of the information Erik posted.

And all you muster is two other Buzzes?? Come on, we can do better than that

Luca's sentiments about our statistics I share. I consider statistics important; this shows because I blog frequently about statistics. By calling them "scorecard", it is made clear that these are the numbers the WMF progression is measured by.

The scorecard is significant not only because of what it shows but also what it omits. You find nothing about Wikitionary, Wikiversity, Wikinews. That this perception is widespread shows; Luca calls Erik the deputy director of Wikipedia. There are 270+ Wikipedias; in the scorecard in one screen the "movers and shakers" are shown, they are the top 25 languages. They represent something like 97% of our traffic. Many people predict that mobile access will bring us our biggest growth in the future. At this moment there are no statistics about our mobile traffic.

The great thing is that most of the numbers you are looking for exist; you can find how the languages from India are doing at the same place where you will notice that traffic in African languages is going up as well. The monthly page views are much better now that the bar charts are for 24 months in stead of 12. And I am sure that at some stage the Picard Wikipedia will find its way in the statistics as well.

The scorecard provides great information and indeed for the purpose of governance it is extremely valuable, I am glad with the wealth of other statistics because they indicate trends you will otherwise not find.
Thanks,
GerardM

PS you will find all my blogposts on buzz :)

1 comment:

Stu West said...

Great points, Gerard. There's a little more detail on the different projects on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia.