Tuesday, June 22, 2010

#Wikipedia statistics are not good but not that bad

Improving the reach of Wikipedia is considered to be a strategic goal for the Wikimedia Foundation. When the traffic numbers fall to their lowest since August 2008, things are seriously wrong.

The good news is, the traffic numbers are seriously wrong; the page view aggregators were broken for a few days and this explains a lot.


When you look at the statistics, you will find that the last two months were not as good as the same months in 2009. This is however not the steep decline that is expected by the current trend in the monthly statistics. I hope and expect that the numbers will be corrected so that the anomaly of malfunctioning aggregators will not affect future comparisons.
Thanks,
     GerardM

2 comments:

Erik Zachte said...

Whatever it takes to get your daily blogging fix ;-)

Let me hope and expect something in return: please use the proper channels for bug reports. Bugzilla is the forum for that, as you know very well.

You might reach the people who are in charge of relevant data feed. Maybe the data feed was wrong, maybe the traffic was indeed reduced for some reason.

I already compensate for missing hourly data feeds in myscript (by extrapolating pro rate).

GerardM said...

I asked Erik Moeller about this; he gave me the link that illustrates the blogpost .. I would say that this is a proper channel and also demonstrates that this is well known.

Consequently it helps people appreciate the current stats.

PS I am not surprised that you have a way of compensating for such mishaps.