Thursday, June 02, 2011

#Wikimedia, get the #GLAM statistics in order

The news letter of the Dutch chapter, has a nice item about the effectiveness of Wikipedia when a GLAM wants to have its material be seen by the world.

The numbers are impressive; the Dutch National Archive let it be known that we are 500 times more effective. The numbers were crunched by Kennisland, a "Dutch think tank seeking social innovation to improve the knowledge society", they produced a report in Dutch that is referred to in the news letter.

The report is quite damning on our statistics. I quote in translation: 
At Wikipedia there is a lack of integrated statistics:
Structural cooperation between Wikimedia and the heritage sector occur with increased frequency. Some small tools have been developed to maintain statistics for specific collections on Wikimedia Commons. What is lacking are running statistics on the Wikimedia servers. This makes it labour intensive to gather data and consequently it is less interesting for cultural heritage institutions to contribute to Wikimedia.
There is more but this is not only a known issue, it is not only an actionable issue, many chapters and the Foundation have enough money; the existing code on the Toolserver did not get reviewed so we do not even have to wait for review. All we need is a developer who is willing and able to do the work.

I have asked a friend with extensive MediaWiki experience for a quote. He promised me a quote by Wednesday. If other developers come up with a plan on how to improve the GLAM statistics, I am happy to learn from them.

When I have a quote, I will be looking for a chapter or somebody to pay for it. That will be next week.
Thanks,
      GerardM

1 comment:

Leigh Thelmadatter said...

Love it or not, statistics are a fact of life. We may never have needed them before with the astronomical growth rates WP had in its early days. However, at 10 years of age, we are the old guys in the Internet world.

Our power now lies in being the biggest and the best of our genre- online encyclopedias. We need stats as one tool to know that we are still that, not to mention keep tabs on current and future competitors.