Monday, April 23, 2007

Lies, damned lies and statistics

It has often been said that the only "reliable" statistics are the ones that you compile yourself. Strike that, I am not great at this science of statistics, I just use them to blind people with what is made obvious in this way. A week ago we celebrated that we had 15.000 Expressions for German. Today we celebrate that we have over 10.000 Expressions in Italian.

According to Kipcool, the statistics are wrong. His statistics take into account the fact that we occasionally have reason to delete Expressions. According to his figures we have 14.020 German and 9.776 Italian Expressions. This means that we may celebrate the round numbers again at a later date.. :)

For the Destinazione Italia project in OmegaWiki, we will need translations in many languages with an emphasis on European languages. As we already have a lot of content in Italian, it is important to mark what is already there also is known to be part of this collection. In this way do we know how many Expressions are there to process.

It seems to me that numbers, statistics tell a story, they tell as much about what is represented as about the person who uses the data. It is after the collaboration on statistics that you find what the numbers actually mean and what they truly represent. After such a process, they have become the statistics of a project and are owned by its community.

Thanks,
GerardM

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