[Foundation-l] wikistats (was Information flow)

Thu Aug 25 22:24:56 UTC 2005

On 8/25/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> Right now (on wikipedia-l) people are
> browsing through the "what links here" list to find the number of
> links.  This work could be saved by presenting a "select count(*)"
> at the top of the [[Special:Whatlinkshere]] page, at virtually no
> extra cost.  Such counts could be presented also for the lists of
> user contributions, pages belonging to a category, etc.
> 
> Collecting statistics from full database dumps is a slow and heavy
> process.  We could do better.  But only if we know which stats to
> collect.
> 

Having these counts in MediaWiki would be great, and not just for
researchers. Of general use, apart from "What links here" would be
User contributions and Recent Changes - if recent changes can be
selected by in the last 1,3,7...days, couldn't they be counted
automatically?

I'm not sure how generally useful (or possible) it would be to count
other more specific things like, say, number of times this user has
edited this article, but above are my top three.

Cormac