There are a lot of metrics which could be defined, and each has its own merits: * number of articles: an indication of the amount of subjects covered, and for "completeness" of the topics covered. More articles will probably draw more visitors. * number of participants: probably an indication of potential growth * number of new articles / month : current growth * Number of articles * length: a better indication of the amount of information available. * Number of corrections / article: probably an indication of quality, but might also be an indication of vandalism. * Turnover rate in the number of active editors might be an excellent indication of a communities health. If the group is stable, but new editors quickly disappear that is a strong indication that the group is nt very open to newbies. That is just a short list Erik suggested valuable metrics. It would be nice of every community for its homepage could choose from a list of these metrics, instead of just the article count.
On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com>wrote: > 2009/9/22 Mike Godwin <mnemo...@gmail.com>: > > My own personal view is that, in an ideal world, we'd post two or more > > metrics for every project (article numbers, number of editors, and > perhaps > > other metrics like, perhaps, external links). That would create a design > > problem given our current home page, but probably not an unsolvable one. > > > > The idea here is that, with multiple metrics, we can hypothesize more > > clearly about trends -- e.g., when the article number rate of increase > > declines, but numbers of editors and external links increases, we may be > > able to make some more reasonable guesses about what's happening on that > > project. > > > > Obviously, Erik Zachte's work in this are is extremely (I'm inclined to > say > > uniquely) valuable -- I'm wondering how we can better integrate his > research > > into how the projects initially represent themselves to users upon entry. > > I don't know if we necessarily need multiple metrics on the home page, > but we certainly should be considering multiple metrics. To move from > just considering article counts to just considering participants to > population ratios would be a very bad idea. Do we have an expert > statistician around that can do some regression testing, or similar, > and work out what the real relationships are between these various > metrics? For examples, what kind of correlation is there actually > between number of participants and article creation rates? Does that > correlation vary for different sized Wikipedias (and for other > projects)? Etc. etc. > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
