Wikipedia talk:Xiong's stats

message: Well, if I'd meant "holy", I'd have said so; this is a more pedestrian grail. {grin} But yes, all questions about what kind of editing is going on need much more numbers. I've detailed what I think might be useful. 
I'm new around here; so far all my requests for more hard data have run into dead ends. There are only two roads I see open, neither of which I am eager to travel: 
* Buy another machine and a big hard drive, download the entire database, download LAMP (or half of it anyway), study up, install the whole damn thing and query the database myself. Don't push me to that extremity, because from there it's only a short step to forking the project and once I've done that, I don't have to convince anybody of anything, for I will be the Jimbo. 
* Buttonhole every developer I can, with random begging letters. This is not the Chinese Way, and as much as I uphold the American Way, I've become irrevocably Easternized. In China, nobody ever cold calls -- it's unthinkable. We don't even go shopping in stores unless we know somebody. One reason for this flimsy preliminary analysis is to attract attention -- in the best American tradition of a cheap brass band on Main Street -- in hopes of getting the ear of Somebody who has the ear of Somebody who has the ear... it's the Chinese Way. 
Any suggestion, talk to me. Obviously I don't know what I'm doing. — Xiong熊talk* 17:41, 2005 May 20 (UTC)
**Do you know precisely what information, beyond "what kind of editing", you want? Is it essentially an edit classification system? Here are some edit types I can think of:
***revert
***adding categories, templates, interwiki-links
***spelling, grammar edits
***"wikifying" - refactoring to conform to style/referencing guidelines
***content addition
***refactoring content
***content removal
**I imagine writing a program to do something like that classification is quite a task in itself. Remember that such a program would only need to take as input a diff of changes, so there is probably value in writing a function (in any language) that has the signature
*** edit_type detect_edit_type( string old_text , string new_text );
**Getting this function implemented is independent of figuring out the best way to extract the text from the database. 
**Pcb21| Pete 08:50, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: For this more limited activity, I think the sensible option is to expand Erik's current scripts. It is clear that at least some (or perhaps, all) of his stats are limited to the mainspace, and so he already has some namespace detection (the namespace is probably in the database tables). How much work you will need to do will depend on how much enthusiasm he has for the project, I suppose. Pcb21| Pete 10:48, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Seems like a wise thing to say. Pcb21| Pete 10:48, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grail 

message: I'm sorry, but I cannot verify your analysis of mean article size and edits per article. First the article size is and growth much smaller - maybe you confused a row? Second you cannot put a linear scale into a logarithmic scale! As I wrote in "Measuring Wikipedia" (page 4) for the German Wikipedia:
: Until February 2005 all metrics (database size, number of words, links, active Wikipedians,  very active Wikipedians) increased similarly with around 18 percent increase per month.  Only the number of articles increased slower with 13.8 percent. [...] That means  article's size, number of links and numbers of active Wikipedians per article continuously rise.
I have no doubt that also fits for English Wikipedia. Here is a small graph indicating that mean number of edits per article also growth exponentially but not that fast.
Can you have a second look and update your statistics? -- Nichtich 11:56, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error