Wikipedia talk:Statistics Department/Archive 1

Statistics
I'm interested in statistics that would help one understand the social aspects of wiki usage, for example, group dynamics that made Wikipedia a success and other wiki projects a failure.

Currently, there are too many research questions. There's a lack of focus. So a few suggestions/questions:
 * 1) How about focussing on a key question?
 * 2) How about moving questions of lesser importance into a KIV page?
 * 3) Who can help us collect the necessary data?

key question
From the List of WikiProjects, which ones are doing the best in terms of:
 * 1) activity: participants, discussions, etc.
 * 2) quantity of articles created/improved
 * 3) progress toward meeting goals
 * 4) overal value of work products
 * 5) other factors comprising usefullness
 * How can these be measured?
 * What data can be looked at?
 * What metrics can be used?

data collection
An idea for collecting data by parsing the List_of_WikiProjects can be seen if you look closely at WikiProjectCentral. It has been suggested that one should join the realtime chat network for wikiprojects at freenode: #wikiproject. Note that this is a long-term experimental process, so please be patient and open-minded.

intro and idea (tomlouie)
Howdy. I've seen some wiki critiques about how someone reading a wiki article may not know if the page is in flux, ie: are they reading it while the page is in the middle of a wide swinging edit war. Or is this a page that rarely gets modified. While the page history and last edit time text shows this, I believe that an icon view of this information can be useful.

I'm keen on helping develop a graph-like element that can be added to the header or footer of Wiki pages. The element would be small, maybe 100px wide, 30px tall. The horizontal axis would show time, and the vertical axis would indicate percentage change of the article. Ideally, this graphical element can be updated even if the reader hasn't refreshed the page, as this will give an indication of whether the page has changed since the last refresh.

Any thoughts about such a tool? Tomlouie | Talk 18:27, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 14:21, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:33, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Inactive WikiProject
Hello, is anybody here?

I am doing some processing on a database dump of the English Wikipedia. Almost as a by-product, I have made some statistics and a diagram (and there are more to come). I was looking for a place to put it, and this one seemed most convenient. If anybody besides me frequents this WikiProject, please leave some sign here, and I'll remove the inactive flag. Contributing to an inactive project feels contradictory, doesn't it? AttishOculus 06:22, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
 * This project seems to have been mostly forgotten. Considering that WikiProject Wikidemia is barely active, and same goes for Wikimedia Research Network, I'd suggest we ask all interested editors to join one (or both) of those two initatives (which have larger scope).--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 02:42, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Statistics department and Wikidemia
I propose the WikiProject Wikidemia and this project merge into one - neither is particularly active and they basically cover similar areas. It would be nice to see some active research, and merging them into one project would at least create a comprehensive project as a starting point. Richard001 02:41, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Webalizer
Are the Wikipedia Webalizer stats public information? For academic purposes, is it possible to inspect them? Jehochman Hablar 00:03, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia records
If you know of any Wikipedia records, please add them to Wikipedia records. Thanks! --  Jreferee  (Talk) 21:18, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Article length
Is that true? That almost no articles are longer than 150 x 100 bytes? That is 15,000 bytes? That the biggest drop in article size is at 3,000 to 4,000 bytes? Is that still true today? 199.125.109.103 (talk) 13:48, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

personal stats?
I could swear that at some point, I saw a page which contained stats on a particular user (I believe at the time, an admin was using it to illustrate how many edits a user had made), but I can't for the life of me find this special page. Can anyone point me to it? Thanks TheHYPO (talk) 13:59, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Intro
I added my name to the article page and was instructed to introduce myself here. So here I am. You may know me from my time between edits link in the template. Even though some other users have noted that this project seems to be "mostly forgotten" I think that there is still a lot of great statistical work being done--that work is just not always noted here. I think in the early days of Wikipedia, when it was still growing dramatically, there was far more attention to statistics. Now that Wikipedia is well established, perhaps much of that initial growth interest is gone. However, I think there is a renewed interest at a far deeper level. I think editors and interested users are getting more and more interested in analyzing how knowledge is being created, who is doing it, and how are they doing it. I think there is a lot of excellent work being done at the toolserver, such as Soxred93's dazzling set of tools. I think that his analysis utilities, and others like it, constitute the current face of statistical interest in Wikipedia. Just my 2-cents!  κaτaʟ aveno TC 12:59, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Sections
Is there any page/study/etc that shows wich section on the main page gives more visitors? Thanks in advance. lijealso (talk) 03:47, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Study of survival times of Wikipedia vandalism
Greetings! I have added my user-name to this project, and I would like to ask for some feedback and commentary on my recent study of the survival times (minutes before correction) for Wikipedia vandalism. You can read the first draft of my report at User:Aetheling/Vandalism survival. One of the important take-away messages of this study is that none of the moments of the distribution of survival times exist in a mathematical sense, and that therefore any reported mean time to correction is completely worthless. The median time to correction found in this study was just four minutes — pretty darn good! —Aetheling (talk) 19:36, 15 June 2009 (UTC).

Images: non-free count vs. free count
Could one of you enterprising souls come up with a number of total images available on Wikipedia (not Commons, but locally here) and of that total how many of them are marked as non-free? Thanks, --Hammersoft (talk) 15:07, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Special:Statistics shows Uploaded files: 856,210 and for Category:Non-free Wikipedia files this tool shows There are 246625 articles in Category:Non-free_Wikipedia_files at en.wikipedia.org.. Take this figure with care as the category might contain other pages (like templates), and not all Non-free images might be in this category(tree). HenkvD (talk) 15:58, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Missing stack in User:Tompw/bookshelf, Size in volumes etc.
I posted the following at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Statistics on Tuesday (Feb. 21), and Melcombe suggested on my talk page that this was the correct project instead.

So I’m hoping someone is out there despite the “inactive” tag on the project front page.

....

I posted the following at Help desk yesterday, and they suggested I seek consensus in the relevant project, which I think is this.

....

The display of "how big is Wiki in terms of printed books", which is included in several places (notably Size of Wikipedia), appears to have a problem in the way it calculates the size of the display. For example, the current display computes the size as equivalent to 1634 volumes, but then displays that as approximately 7 1/6 full stacks (shelves of books), rather than the correct (approximately) 8 1/6th stacks. It appears to be a relatively simple miscalculation (rounding the result to nearest rather than rounding up, see description below).

The problem is that this is hosted at User:Tompw/bookshelf. I have left a message regarding this at User_talk:Tompw (reproduced below).

Unfortunately Tompw appears to be inactive. They've made one edit since last July (in October), and they've not responded to my message in several days.

So I have two questions.

First, as a matter of etiquette, should I go ahead and fix the code under User:Tompw/bookshelf?

Second, given the general use of these pages/images, should this be moved out of user space, and perhaps set up as a template?

(the following was posted to User_talk:Tompw on Feb 16):

-- Missing stack in User:Tompw/bookshelf, Size in volumes etc. -- I believe the number of stacks in the various "how big is Wiki in printed books" graphics is missing a stack. It's currently 1634 volumes, which should be eight full stacks, plus a partial ninth stack. It's displaying seven full stacks plus a partial eighth. I believe the problem is with the calculation in User:Tompw/bookshelf/stacks. It's currently: &#123;&#123; #expr: &#123;&#123;User:Tompw/bookshelf/volumes&#125;&#125;/200 round 0&#125;&#125; It should probably be something like &#123;&#123; #expr: ceil(&#123;&#123;User:Tompw/bookshelf/volumes&#125;&#125;/200)&#125;&#125; (I think I did the conversion of braces correctly, but if the above has ended up with a missing or extra brace, I apologize in advance.) The round function is not what you'd really want. Round would convert 300-499 books (1.500 to 2.495 stacks) to 2, and 500-699 books (2.500 to 3.495 stacks) to 3. Ceil will get the next highest integer. Thus 1.005 through 2.000 (201-400 books) would get 2, but 2.005 through 3.000 (401-600 books) would get 3. Likewise, the calculation in User:Tompw/bookshelf/volumes, should probably be changed from: &#123;&#123;#expr:(&#123;&#123;NUMBEROFARTICLES:R&#125;&#125;/(500*2*2*80*50/(6*562)) round 0) + 1&#125;&#125; &#123;&#123;#expr:ceil(&#123;&#123;NUMBEROFARTICLES:R}}/(500*2*2*80*50/(6*562)))&#125;&#125; Although that's only going to be off a book at worst. I haven't quite traced through how the partial stack gets drawn, so I'm not sure if there's an impact there or not. Rwessel (talk) 21:14, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Rwessel (talk) 06:02, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

A new newsletter directory is out!
A new Newsletter directory has been created to replace the old, out-of-date one. If your WikiProject and its taskforces have newsletters (even inactive ones), or if you know of a missing newsletter (including from sister projects like WikiSpecies), please include it in the directory! The template can be a bit tricky, so if you need help, just post the newsletter on the template's talk page and someone will add it for you.
 * – Sent on behalf of Headbomb. 03:11, 11 April 2019 (UTC)