#Reasonator - A new metric for #Wikimedia

Denny wrote a really good article in the SignPost. It includes a "TL:DR" that I am happy to quote.

TL;DR: We should focus on measuring how much knowledge we allow every human to share in, instead of number of articles or active editors. A project to measure Wikimedia's success has been started. We can already start using this metric to evaluate new proposals with a common measure.

The point Denny makes is great; we aim to enable every human being to share in the sum of all knowledge and we should measure the extend to which we are achieving this goal. When you read the article carefully it does not say Wikipedia, it says Wikimetrics. The point Denny makes is very much that we need to focus on what it takes to bring information to people.

Presenting data that is available to us as information is what Reasonator does. It relies on what is known in Wikidata about articles that exist in any Wikipedia. To make this understood to a person, the number of available statements and the number of available labels for an item are key.

When Wikimetrics is to appreciate the potential of Wikidata and the approach Reasonator takes, it should include three bits of information;

• the number of statements per item
• the number of labels per language
• how items are covered with labels in a language

With such an approach the graph will be substantially different. Not one language covers 50% of all the topics known to Wikidata and consequently the graph will show that there is much more work for us to do. It will also indicate that the amount of information that is available for a public that can read English is much larger and the amount available to people who can only read Gujarati is much less.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#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