Sunday, July 13, 2014

#Wikimetrics - What is in it for me?

When you are into #statistics, Wikimedia project statistics, Wikimetrics is a big thing. It is an open environment where you can poor over the collected data to your hearts content.

To make it even better, there will be training in three sessions introducing the tools and necessary skills.  Sweet.

However.. Is all the data in there?

There is a long standing request for information that shows where Wikipedia fails to deliver; what are our readers looking for that they cannot find. When such information is collected, it will be easy enough to use Wikimetrics for this as well. After many years the people who could know, the WMF statisticians, have not been able to say one way or another.

The official statistics for Wikidata do not include page reads at all. The motivation given at the time was nobody is using Wikidata. Maybe.. However, projects have started using Wikidata in templates. There are even categories for such templates.. Tools external to Wikidata like the Reasonator have their own statistics so it may be interesting to know how often what tools access Wikidata. For the Wikidata crowd it is nice to know what impact their work has.

The best thing about Wikimetrics is that it is there. It is wonderful that it gets support and even when more data could be added it is wonderful to see how the Wikimedia Foundation is opening up its data for further perusal by all comers.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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