Developing #statistics at #translatewiki

With a community of some 2000 localisers, there is so much going on at translatewiki.net that we need statistics, newsletters, blog posts and statistics to get the message out. There are people representing the 300+ languages and they do not all master English that well. Many of our localisers use another language as the basis for their localisation work.

Statistics are a very powerful tool; a great statistic says without words what takes many words to explain. The above statistic is new; it shows the number of localisation of the MediaWiki core and all of its extensions that were localised over time. You can see the effect of our community localising the Usability Initiative messages.

The statistics we produce exist to get one message out: "Thank you for the good work you have done.. Want more ?". We only do this for the relations that are easily expressed with numbers. Some relations are obvious but hard to express in stats and graphs. My favourite one is: the quality of localisation and the growth of the number of readers and editors for a Wikipedia. Another question is how important is our community for new Open Source applications that come to translatewiki. Does our community grow when new applications appear.


We would love to have people like Filipe Ortega or Erik Zachte work on such questions but they are typically swamped with work. What may be of interest is that it will not be only Wikimedia related but also benefit OpenStreetMap, Freecol, Shapado ..
Thanks,
     GerardM