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WikiVitalSigns
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesA wiki is like a living thing - it can be healthy, or not, in decline, or not; and like a living thing there is no one metric to test to determine "health". With a living body you do things like measure temperature, heartbeat, blood sugar levels (etc), and from those form a composite picture from which an opinion of "health" can be based.
On CommunityExpectations there is talk of another wiki being in the decline stage of the Wiki:CommunityLifeCycle. My question is what describes "decline", and what describes "health" - that is, what are the physiological signs a good WikiDoctor? could monitor (cf heartbeat, temperature, blood sugar levels, etc)
What are the various vital signs of a wiki?
There are a number of parameters that could be monitored:
- page count
- average page hits per day
- average page hits per day (not counting owners/admins)
- average page creations per day (vis a vis total pages)
- edit/read ratio
- average page creations per day (not counting owners/admins)
- average contributors per day
- homepage count
- homepage creations per month
- new contributors per month
- wanted pages count vs existing pages count (plus variations like average vs mean)
- ratio of new homepages on recent changes compared to real pages
- interconnectednesss of pages vs # of isolated islands
- number of pages with no backlinks
- ...
But I don't know whether anyone has ever monitored these systematically. I intend to do it sometime in the future for the wikis I set up. -- HelmutLeitner
ratio of new homepages on recent changes compared to real pages -- I've noticed on the WikiWiki a preponderance of new home pages recently [May 2001]. Of 300+ entries on recent changes, there are about 50 home pages, and nearly half of those are new home pages. There is a total of 97 "new" pages, of which 22 are new home pages. This is of course only a snapshot in time, and is statistically meaningless. It may mean something, or it may not.
Wiki:WikiReaderToWriterRatio now has a [script link] to compute some stats from.
As of the last three hours (14:44-17:47 on Friday, Oct 25, 2002), it look like WikiWikiWeb is serving about one page per 3 second, and one page edit is submitted every 4.5 minutes. It looks like traffic right now is about 1/3 the "typical" amount for more busy times.