Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-842519-20121219122944/@comment-188432-20130113184035

Razorgirl wrote: Oh, I just realised that "Edits" may not include posting a comment on a page and/or in a Forum. We have a LOT of people that are active in discussions but never make Edits to pages (fear of coding maybe?).

In Special:WikiStats/main — everywhere maybe but here at Community Central — column G means edits in ns:0. It doesn't mean comments or forums or other namespaces. It's the most accurate measure we have of how much the main content area of a wiki is growing.

This is not the same thing as a measurement of how much your wiki is growing, because wikis can have meaningful custom namespaces, or because maybe your subject matter is weighted towards one of the other namespaces. If you were wiki about wikis, it might be very meaningful to you how much your template namespace were growing, or even how much your MediaWiki namespace were being altered.

Column I, labeled "images", is fairly useful, in that it seems to be the genuine number of images your wiki has. It's a lower number than the tally number over the recent images module in the right rail of pages. I think this is because it's actually giving you thte total number of just images, while the right rail number is everything in the file namespace, which includes videos, sounds, pdf files, and any number of other formats. I'm not positive about the reason for this difference, but looking at our numbers at w:c:tardis, that's what I would guess.

Column J, labeled "video", is a stat that's frozen in time. It's the number of videos originally uploaded to the old Video namespace, which no longer exists. I'm honestly not sure why Wikia keep this column going, but they have. It's completely useless to any wiki created after March 2012, and it's just a bit of nostalgia for the rest of us.

Now if you go over to WikiStats/rollups you find some other data. I have no idea why Wikia grossly simplified this material. It used to be that this gave you per namespace data. You'd be able to see how much activity was in the rest of the wiki. And I'm not buying the idea floated above that they restricted this for business reasons. It's of no interest whatsoever to a competitor exactly how many edits we've made in the MediaWiki or Template or File talk namespaces.

It also used to be that you could get more than a year's worth of data, but this, too has been curtailed. I don't get this one either, but I will say that an effect of closing this down to just the last 12 months is that it will soon cover up the errors done to the stats in the wake of the March 2012 destruction of the Video namespace. If your wiki's been around since January 2013, you can see that the columns don't match the data in the columns. At tardis:Special:WikiStats/rollup you can see that during Feburary 2012 we supposedly had 74213 deletes. This is meant to be edits. Somewhere in April 2012 they got the data going back in the right columns, which is why April is a month that edits are split between the Edit column and the Deletes column.

I personally feel secure about the data from the Rollups page only from about June 2012. But it's still not completely accurate, because it says that it's giving data from Namespace Main (0). That's absolutely not true, as I can tell from looking at our Daily rollups. It's actually all edits in all namepsaces. So the Rollups stat is different than the one you get in Special:WikiStats/main.
 * Rollups stats in every column are from all namespaces, in the entire wiki
 * Main stats in most columns are just from the "content area", which is basically just ns:0.

It's a shame that daily rollups don't give per-namespace data anymore, cause that was really useful.

Here's a run-down of the other three tabs:

WikiStats/breakdown is useless. Almost totally useless. It ranks registered editors by edits in content namespaces only. In some cases, this can be a massively different number than their total number o edits. For instances, my "content namespace" edit count is only 26,814 at w:c:tardis. But my total edit number is coming up on 60,000. Far better to look at Editcount than WikiStats/breakdown if you want a true picture of someone's editing. Even the columns that tell you when someone last edited are better seen at Special:UserList. The only utility of this entire tab, at least as far as I can see, is that it quickly tells you who's been editiing the main namespace within a certain amount of time. More on that later.

anonbreakdown has the same limitations of breakdown, but it's more useful because you can't do an anon EditCount. As far as I know, this is the only way you're going to get any data about IP editorship, aside from looking at a contributions page. Of course, there's no guarantee that a single IP means a single user, so you do have to remember that you may not be looking at an individual's stats.

But it's still useful to broadly see how productive IP users are on your site. I don't think any one line of ths report is all that helpful, but it does give you a sense of how important (or not) IP editors are to your wiki.

One aspect of this report I do like is its apparent ability to tell you how many IP editors are active on your site. If you set the number of anons to 100, and the changes to the last 1 month, you'll get a number which is all the IP editors active in the last month. At c:tardis that number is 13 right now, and we've only got one of those active today, though 8 have been active in the last 72 hours. You can then manually cross-tabulate that info with the number of active registered editors and get a sense of the whole community. At tardis, we have 44 registered and 13 unregistered editors who have been active in the last month.

But there are caveats to this data:
 * They include bots (so long as they edit in the main namespace), but exclude people who don't edit in the main namespace.  So if you work for a solid month on your wiki's CSS, and that's all you do, you won't show up in a breakdown report — even though a bot that's spell checking the wiki will show up.
 * The definition of a "month" is odd. As of today, we've got a couple of editors who've been absent for 30 and 31 days, and the system isn't counting that as "the past month". We don't have anyone who's edited between 18 and 30 days, so I don't know what the precise definition of a "month" is. My guess, based on the precise last edit time of our "30 day-er" is that a month is anything that is precisely 30 days or less (i.e. < 30d0h0m) based on the UTC of the last edit.   That's still strange though, because it effectively cuts off the 30th day.

WikiStats/activity is, to my mind, one of the more useful tabs. It gives you a sense of how well you wiki is doing relative to other wikis in the network. Don't be thrown off by the fact that the tab is labelled "Language activity". In fact that's only one way you can look at the data. You can also do comparisons on the basis of month and category, and then you can organise the results by title, number of unique users (well, really, this is unique editors, not users), number of edits, number of articles and the last time the wiki was edited.

In a lot of ways, although you have to fiddle with it, this is maybe the most useful tab, because it quickly tells you where you are relative to the previous month. Do you have more or fewer unique editors? Do you have more or fewer edits — and this number is for the whole wiki, not just ns:0 — than last month? Have you deleted more articles than you've created? These are questions that you can answer here.

Now, of course you can answer these questions by using a combination of main and rollups — but you can't do it relative to other wikis. And that gives you the ability to extrapolate a new metric: relative efficacy of your users. If you organise the chart by "edits", you can see that by far the most efficient wiki in the bunch is w:c:colors. They only have 3 users, but have amassed 32,363 edits. w:c:colors is obviously a bit of an exception, since a couple of users have found a way to automate the process of page creation for this specialist subject. But you can apply the simple math of [ edits / users ] to any wiki and come up with an efficiency index.

I suppose the best thing about the activity tab is that you can sort of peek into the top line of someone else's statistics without having to leave your own wiki. This can be useful if you want to monitor the health of related wikis, like different language versions of your own subject.

And that's it! There used to be more to talk about with WikiStats, but no more. Oh! I guess I forgot about Special:Statistics I really don't understand this page, because its numbers are way off those seen at Special:WikiStats/main. For instance, it says our content pages at w:c:tardis are 31,274. WikiStats has this number at 35,816. I honestly have no idea why there's about a 4500 page difference. There's also a significant difference between Special:Statistics' uploaded files number (18,988) and WikiStat's images number (17,633) and the right rail's tally number (18,540). I can kinda see the diff between the tally and the WikiStats number, but the Special:statistics number is just weirdly high.

There are only two truly unique bits of data from Special:Statistics:
 * the total number of edits your wiki has seen during its lifetime
 * the date of the latest database dumps

All admin should occasionally grab the latest database dump just to ensure that they've got a record of their entire wiki that's in a separate location to the Wikia servers. In the event of a catastrophe – or simply the dissolution of Wikia, Inc. — the wiki will be able to survive.