This is an archive of past discussions with User:Henrik. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hello, I'm working on dbpedia, a project by the Freie Universitat Berlin (http://dbpedia.org/About); we would like to use your stats tool, if possible, to implement a new feature which aims at fuse information coming from the different wikipedia versions. It is possible to contact you via e-mail? My email address is eugenio -at- favoriti -dot- it
Thanks.
Eugenio
AfC news
Dear AfC participant,
Msgj and Tnxman307 are organising the AfC challenge! It's a little competition to help improve some of the articles created through AfC and we are hoping that everyone will get involved. For level 1, you just need to bring a stub up to Start-class. Level 2 is improving a Start-class article to C-class. And so on. To get involved or for more information please see the competition page.
Those of you who haven't reviewed an article recently might not have noticed the new process that was implemented this year. Reviewing articles is now more enjoyable than ever :) You might like to give it a try. All articles waiting for review are in Category:Pending Afc requests. (Please read the updated instructions.)
Please consider adding {{AFC status}} to your userpage to keep track of the number of articles waiting for review. At the time of writing we are officially backlogged, so help is needed!
There is currently a proposal to bring the Images for upload process under the umbrella of WikiProject Articles for creation. The rationale is that both processes are designed to allow unregistered users to take part more fully in Wikipedia, and partipants in each process can probably help each other.
If you no longer wish to receive messages from WikiProject Articles for creation, please remove your name from this list. Thank you.
Nope, it is actually base 10. :-) What is displayed as "7.3k" is exactly 7274 hits, which divided by 1000 and rounded to two decimals is 7.3. Had it been displayed in kibiviews, it would have said 7.1k. Cheers! henrik•talk06:01, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Is there any possible reason for the anomaly? If not, I would suspect that some expert hacker or group of hackers deliberately spammed page requests. TeH nOmInAtOr (talk) 07:36, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Who knows? Referrer information is not kept. It could be a script or some "hacker", but I think it's far more likely that that article happened to be linked from some popular blog or forum. henrik•talk07:39, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Yes, it was featured as a DYK on the 10th. Apparently that's a great way to get pageviews. I never realized how many people actually pay attention to those features. Bob the Wikipedian(talk • contribs) 20:27, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Apparently this too is tracked by the DYK folks: see Wikipedia:DYKSTATS which I just found out about today. It seems the all time high is 70k views, but even 7k would seem to make it eligible to be listed on that page. henrik•talk20:31, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Re: Unacceptable
I know it's unacceptable... I've just been under a great deal of stress lately in regards to some medicine I recently just had a withdrawal attack on, and it's not been going very smoothly. I haven't got much sleep, and I am going to the court downtown at 8 in the morning tomorrow to observe a criminal jury trial. Everything has really been exhausting.
But I know that's no excuse to behave the way I have been. I'm just going to stay away from political articles for a month, same goes for controversial issues in general.
However, why am I being ratted out for providing significant contributions to the AfD section? I'm fairly certain that the rules state that anyone can contribute to the AfDs, and I always give my honest opinion about whether an article should stay, and I know enough (at least I think) to determine whether an article is merited.
I'm trying to find some common ground instead of being an adversary, and your "poor taste" comment I find kind of offensive, frankly. But if you're afraid it will cause trouble, then just delete the whole section. Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots07:19, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I have done so. If you wish to find common ground, try to do it in another way than obliquely criticizing at the politics of his chosen party (preferably in a way that has nothing to do with politics at all). Given the previous problems were largely political and as Axmann has agreed to stay away from politics, I can not for the life of me understand why opening up a political discussion on his talk page could be a good idea. I have to say, this is exactly the sort of behavior that many of the opposes at your RfA cited, and I am sad to see that you haven't taken their advice to heart. henrik•talk07:31, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I don't see how him trying to find common ground is in any way encouraging a political debate. Henrik, have you noticed that many times when you attempt to prevent unneeded drama, you create it yourself? I'm sure you mean well, but your rude comments do more harm than good. Many situations would be better off if you kept your nose out of it. Landon1980 (talk) 07:43, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Heh. You could say I'm trying out a more assertive management style. Perhaps I haven't found quite the right tone yet. :) henrik•talk08:32, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
(ec)And I find Henrik's "this sort of behavior" comment offensive also. Axmann says he's an America-firster, which I claim to be also. He says he's agnostic, which is an interesting position for a right-winger to take, and which is absolutely contrary to his "chosen party", and is probably closer to my own philosophy, so there's another possible area of discussion. But forget it. I'm done watching anything to do with Obama. I tried to defend the Palin page last fall and got yelled at for it. I tried to defend the Obama page recently and got yelled at for it. The priorities here are all wrong. You guys should put content first, but instead you put the highest priority on "anyone can edit" - despite the fact that Axmann betrayed your unblock conditions, which you seem to have overlooked - you asked him not to edit Obama topics, but he only agreed not to edit the Obama page itself - which, as I predicted, he reiterated on the ANI page. I've weeded most of the controversial stuff from my watchlist and I've addressed the RfA complaints about my user page - an RfA that I only entered reluctantly, at another editor's request, after trying to defend Obama last weekend and being accused of being "too hard on the newbies" - that is, the mushrooms assaulting the page after WND put out their garbage about wikipedia. You all can fight the edit wars on the political pages. I'm sick of trying to defend wikipedia and getting very little thanks and mostly abuse for it. I'm told that admins are dropping like flies, and the priorities are a large part of the reason. So I'll stick with stuff that's less likely to be controversial, and you can defend the parapets yourself. Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots07:48, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Politics is a difficult matter in general, and these high profile articles are very difficult to edit. I'd expect almost everyone trying to edit the Palin or Obama articles regularly to get yelled at. :)
The reason why "anyone can edit" is so important is long term success: In the short run, we could easily remove anyone not already familiar with the intricate rules and regulations of editing, but over time Wikipedia would stagnate and end up a dead site of spam (I've seen this happen to other wikis). Unfortunately this quite possibly means that frustration is higher than it could be, and probably also means a higher rate of turnover of editors getting fed up by never ending drama. But getting new people into the system is essential over the long term.
But lest anyone thinks otherwise: Baseball Bugs, your effort here is appreciated. This is a volunteer job, and most of us are doing it because we find it fun and interesting: me and you both included. I can still respect you while disagreeing over a given course of action. henrik•talk08:32, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
AFC script
Hey, could you fix your AFC script? The language template, {{afc lang}} has been deleted as obsolete; could you replace it with this template: {{AFC submission|D|lang}} Thanks! Cheers. I'mperator17:23, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, I don't really have a good mechanism for sharing the long term raw data: mainly because of size, it's hundreds of GB by now and I only keep it in database format (the last month or so is available at dammit.lt/wikistats) henrik•talk19:35, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Now that Axmann has been indef-blocked (probably for good) and his talk page is protected and he's out of the picture (barring hosiery appearances), Henrik deserves a "sympathy card" for having had his good faith stomped upon. Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots16:08, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
True. As soon as I saw him unblocked I knew it was one of those "matter of time" situations. The initial blocking admin never consented to Axeman being unblocked, see here. That block was only for a week, so there would have been a similar, inevitable outcome though. It was obvious to me he was going to be one of those editors that just doesn't get it. He never had any intentions of building an encyclopedia. From day one it was obvious he was a POV warrior. Landon1980 (talk) 17:10, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Probably right. But occasionally I think it is a good idea to go beyond and above: sometimes you are successful and get a great editor. But I have to humbly admit that the score stands at: Fut.Perf: 1 - Henrik: 0 ;-) henrik•talk19:29, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
I have no objections: His continued editing was under the condition that he would stay away from politics for a month while hopefully learning the culture here. I'm sad to see that he was not able to do it. He had plenty of chances and several editors willing to help out, much more than the average newbie gets. henrik•talk19:29, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
I do admire the fact you were willing to go above and beyond. Like you said, he had many chances, and had a very knowledgeable adopter, which is more than the average new editor gets. Sorry it didn't turn out like you had hoped, and I hope this didn't put a dent in your ability to assume good faith with new (somewhat controversial) editors. Maybe in a month or two Axeman will see the light and come back and be one of the best darn editors this encyclopedia has ever seen. I wouldn't hold my breath, but stranger has happened. Cheers. Landon1980 (talk) 20:10, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
You gave him far more rope than he deserved, and as sometimes happens, he lynched himself. It's one thing to be editing many political articles and many other topics also. It's another when a user arrives with a single purpose. Typically, a single-purpose account, someone on a mission of some kind, adds up to trouble and eventual blocking. My main fear now is that he'll make good on his threats and we'll have another WND army descending on us. Good luck with that. :) Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots00:13, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Question about Wikipedia article traffic statistics
Could someone please explain (or direct me to an explanation of) what the page shows, exactly? Is that page loads? (please reply here). -Freekee (talk) 00:03, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello Henrik. I haven't found a quick answer so I hope you can tell me – just for my own curiosity – how this tool works since I always thought the number of reading accesses isn't recorded. So where do you get your data from? --Fridel (talk) 20:06, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Ok, I found the description "Domas Mituzas put together a system to gather access statistics from wikipedia's squid cluster", but honestly I don't understand it ;-). --Fridel (talk) 21:05, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
No, the count will be under the name the page was accessed under. To get the total number of views, all the redirects have to be added together. henrik•talk16:27, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
whoa, wow!! that is very interesting. I'm definitely adding that to my collection. :-) incredible! thanks. let's keep in touch. feel free to send any more. thanks! --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 13:55, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
Henrik
I am really tired of all the hypocrisy on Wikipedia. WP:TRIFECTA is a complete joke. It is not that simple. If you don't know every single Wikipedia policy, you are doomed to fail here. Even if you try to do good (none of my edits were done in bad faith), you're damned from the start if you're not a pro. Not very collaborative, if I may. I am really on my last straw. I already know this isn't the community I thought it was, now I'm just waiting to see if things change and people stop being so selfish. People here act like they're gods just because they can paraphrase sources. Really, Wikipedia seems like a big façade. Anyone can learn the stuff here with a simple google search. This really seems like an unfriendly community, and has not made a good impression on me. I very much believe that Wikipedia is extremely partisan and leftist, and unless that is changed, then Wikipedia will not succeed.
I am very disappointed in this seemingly unfriendly community.
I can definitely sympathize with what you wrote above. I don't believe you've edited in bad faith either, but I do think you might be a bit impulsive. As I say on my user page, I wish we as a collective could be more calm, more willing to ignore insults and more skilled in defusing conflicts. Unfortunately that has remained a wish.
As way of explanation: once you start attracting the attention of the, let's call it the immune system of wikipedia, you'll be under very close scrutiny, the place becomes distinctly less friendly, and the learning curve becomes very steep as every edit you make is closely watched. As with the usual immune system, it does a good job most of the time: rapidly ejecting trolls, vandals and those who really can't check their own biases at the door. Sometimes it backfires and attacks those who didn't really deserve it.
I'm impressed that you have stuck by it so far, since you got such a rough start. It can really be a nice place, but you haven't really seen the good parts. I hope you can understand: No system is perfect and that sometimes mistakes are made. henrik•talk20:14, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
What specific issues is Axmann running into? I haven't spun through his history page except he's posting a lot of items for deletion, and maybe that's raising some hackles. That "Trifecta" is interesting. I wasn't aware that one of the rules is to ignore all rules. It's like the opposite of Barney Fife, who used to say, "Rule No.1: Obey all rules!" Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots00:46, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
And it's short, sweet and to the point: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it". It's my favorite policy, but it should be used rarely. :-) henrik•talk17:09, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
csd'ing locations
Sorry for putting that location for CSD. I didn't know they're always notable. I've been trying my best, and I think newpage patrol is a VERY good place for me for the time being.
No problem, you did it in good faith. And, as I said on your talk just now, there seems to be a debate on whether the current consensus should be changed, so it's not exactly an obvious matter. henrik•talk17:04, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
Traffic Statistics: HTML Page Title
Henrik, if you start working on the statistics tool again (currently it doesn't work), I have a tiny feature request. Is it possible to change the HTML page title from "Wikipedia article traffic statistics" to "$Lemma – Wikipedia article traffic statistics"? The page title appears in the browser's history and bookmarks. A unique title will give us faster access to a specific statistics page. Or maybe make it "the first 20 or so characters of $Lemma… – Wikipedia article traffic statistics", since lemmas can be quite long. --Sitacuisses (talk) 07:23, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
Good idea, I'll do that. The stats are offline for a little while until I can fix a bug in the processing script I ran into recently. Shouldn't be long though. henrik•talk08:28, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
How can I use Wikipedia article traffic statistics for finding out the number of downloads of spoken articles. They are usually placed on en-Wikipedia itself under names such as Image:Bird.ogg. Please help.AshLin (talk) 15:22, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia article traffic statistics does not update since March 17th...
It's wonderful tool indeed and I'm so happy to have it. So, why are there no updates since March 17th? Usually it would update every day. I'm worried if everything is OK... Thanks. NazarK (talk) 16:09, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
Oh... Just noticed that -- 'The stats are offline for a little while until I can fix a bug in the processing script I ran into recently. Shouldn't be long though.' a few sections up. That would explain the situation. Thanks again. Waiting for the stats to be up and running again :) NazarK (talk) 16:14, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
live edit counter
Your live edit counter script hasn't been working for a while. I tried to fix it and noticed that this was because it uses the now deprecated query.php interface. My adaptation, using the api.php seems to be working, please take a look at User:Waldir/live-edit-counter.js and update your script if you agree with it, so that others can benefit from it :) Cheers, Waldirtalk14:23, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi. Even if there weren't enough sources for an article right now, that doesn't mean there can't be one in the future. The congress matters blog is relatively new, let's give it a few more months and see if it gets enough mentions in reliable sources for its own article. In the mean-time, perhaps a line or two about it in Daily Kos wouldn't be a bad idea? henrik•talk16:08, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia article traffic statistics
your tool doesn't make a difference regarding different capitalisation
It's a trade-off I chose in the user interface, the database counts them as two distinct entries: In the vast majority of cases, entries that differ only by capitalization refer to the same article - it was/is more convenient for users to not having to get the capitalization exactly right. Of course, some cases do break Gnu vs GNU was pointed out earlier as once fairly visible case. henrik•talk19:06, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
XD Thank you Melancholie! It really works! But I've noted that the link in that page, is not pointing to wikibooks project and we get a "Address Not Found" warning if we click in it... Anyway, thank you a lot! Helder (talk) 13:38, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I just had to "LOL out loud" when he called me "little". I've been called plenty of things in my time, but "little" ain't one of them. In fact, I had expected his comeback to be what they used to say way back in high school after they would ask how tall I was: "Shazam! I didn't know they could stack [manure] that high!" Regardless, my dimly-lit bulb finally came on, and then it occurred to me that his outrageous comments couldn't possibly be meant to be serious. That's what I get for assuming good faith, so to speak. :) Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots23:25, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Politics
Hi Henrik. Is it possible that this comment was posted to the wrong section [2]? I don't see any political discussion in that thread. Am I missing something? ChildofMidnight (talk) 22:04, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Maybe. But then why not post it in that thread instead of one unrelated to political discussion? Seems a bit weird in a thread where the discussion is focused on staying focused. It also wasn't clear who was being referred to. ChildofMidnight (talk) 06:22, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Indeed. I blame the suckiness of the wiki software when used as a discussion forum. No, Landon1980 is entirely correct: it was intended for CENSEI. Sorry for messing up your focused thread. :) henrik•talk06:43, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
This is one of the most astoundingly bizarre things I've ever heard an admin say. You've been trying to work with him?? Why?!? Do you sincerely believe you're helping the project by trying to keep editors like this around? Surely there are many other newbies who are far more likely to become useful contributors, and are thus a better use of your time. Friday(talk)21:16, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Ha, that's what I get for trying. Well, I'm glad I can provide some amusement at least. But yeah, I'm serious. I've been in private conversations with Axmann, which has revealed a slightly different personality than what is readily apparent. (Also, I've been away for a while and I'm all stocked up on good faith). I'll concede though that I've never thought the odds were anything but slim, but still felt it was worth giving it a shot. Should a consensus form that the community's patience is exhausted, I will of course abide by it.
If there are better uses of my time? Most likely, but as we don't get paid I get to choose how to spend it. henrik•talk21:33, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Sure, your time is your own, but, damn.. do you understand how it makes it harder for others to deal with problem editors when you go around encouraging them? Friday(talk)21:37, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I don't make a habit of it, no. This was a singular attempt to see what could be done, I don't plan on trying to rescue every problem editor. henrik•talk21:43, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Well, fair enough. Sorry if I came off sounding overly harsh- clearly you're just trying to do what you think is best. Good luck. Friday(talk)21:46, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
My "indef block proposal"
Is it just me, or does this seem like a trap to get me banned? Orangemike even said himself that I should re-add the userbox, and then I get a proposal to ban indef? WTF? -Axmann8(Talk)22:00, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
AX you werent' asking me, but the userbox isn't the real problem. The real issue is a general feeling that you are using WP as a battleground. The userbox is just a piece of a larger puzzle. Bad reputations are easy to earn and hard to get rid off. When people who know your history see things like that box and the IAR edit you made in violation of your topic ban, they begin to loose whatever trust they have in you. I think you can do better, but you have to abide by the topic ban and chill out for a while and let they storm clouds move on.--Adam in MOTalk22:10, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
And, pardon me for butting in, but your "first amendment" nonsense will only make it really clear that you're either extremely confused about policy, what the first amendment covers and does not, and the nature of Wikipedia - or else a really annoying troll. Its one of the two. KillerChihuahua?!?23:01, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
If he's indef blocked again it needs to be for violating his topic ban, and not for the racist userbox. Normally people that violate topic bans are blocked on sight. Wikipedia appears to be the opposite of what you contend, axmann, if biased at all. This all amounts to POV editing. I may be wrong but I don't think you will ever be able to leave your POV at the door. I would not support a block at this time, but IMO you will inevitably land in the indefinite block zone (as in no admin is willing to unblock you). Landon1980 (talk) 23:06, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Correct, it's not the box anymore. It's the fact that he has made no less than six edits in violation of his topic ban, and it's time he gets the boot. Grsz1100:09, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello. On stats.grok.se/fr/, I get the figures dated August 2008. How can I get a more recent list?
If I consult the data for one page, I can get last month's data (ex: stats.grok.se/fr/200902/YouTube, but I didn't found out how to get an updated Top-1000 list. 6 months ago, I succesfully checked the Top-1000 of Aug-08 with AutoWikiBrowser, and I'd like now to check the updated list...) Zetud (talk) 22:28, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Had their edits and posts not been so blatantly COI and non-NPOV, I might agree with you (although I'm pretty hardnosed on spamusernames and role accounts in general). If some other admin wants to unblock them for a namechange, I won't stand in their way. --Orange Mike | Talk19:40, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
I occasionally have people ask me how to make a list of the most frequently viewed articles in a topic area. Assuming that they can make a list of all the articles they are interested in, the next thing they have to do is to get hitcounts for all of them. Would it be possible to set up some sort of bulk query of the stats.grok.se data (say 100-500 articles at a time) to make this efficient? That would save these people from needing to download the raw data themselves. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:01, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
The json interface should be reasonably efficient for this. The main overhead isn't the web request in any case, it's the database lookup: providing a web interface to do bulk queries wouldn't really help that much other than making it more convenient. Doing runs of 100-500 articles against the json interface occasionally isn't a problem. henrik•talk08:41, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I did not know there is a JSON interface, that is exactly what I am looking for. Is it documented somewhere? — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:02, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
What if I want to get the data for 1000 pages at a time? That's really sort of the feature that I need. But I appreciate you may not have the bandwidth for that sort of thing. — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:18, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
Loop over the set of pages you want to query and make a thousand requests to the json interface. You don't really need to worry about bandwidth, the json requests are tiny. The main problem is probably performance: a lookup takes between 0.1 to a second or more, depending a bit (old months are archived to a more compact and faster format once they are complete). But as long as you are patient and only run a single query thread you probably won't melt my server :-)
There's no real good way around the performance unless someone wants to give me money to build a real datacenter to run the stats service: doing random lookups in large amounts of data will be limited by hard disk spindle speed. henrik•talk13:36, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
THANK you for creating this great tool. I wonder if it would be possible to add option to show most popular articles within a scope of a given Wikiproject and/or category? There is a tool for scanning categories to generate article lists here: CatScan, I think it wouldn't be that difficult to tie those tools so that CatScan would generate lists of articles, and stat tool would check their popularity and rank them. User:Mathbot also can generate list of articles in categories and subcategories. Alternatively, we could scan by using the Wikipedia 1.0 system (which looks at talk page tags and generates such stats) but I am not sure how exactly it is done. The reason I am asking for this feature is that WikiProject Poland would like to improve the most popular articles related to Poland and WWII before the upcoming anniversary of WWII (1st Sept), but while we can speculate what articles are the most important, we don't really know which ones are the most popular. Such a tool would be a boon to many a wikiproject, as well as to scientists studying Wikipedia (and I am also speaking as one of them). Once again, thank you for your great work! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 20:04, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi Piotrus. I agree: this would be great; unfortunately the database isn't structured in a good way, it would likely take a long time to do all the processing for a large category. I'll give it some more thought, it would be a great feature. henrik•talk17:28, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Is there possibility to register or to know how many times was specific page displayed ?
Hello. I would like to ask you, if there is possibility to register or to know how many times was specific page displayed ? Thank you. Softvision (talk) 18:14, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
Your tool that shows how often pages are read generates handsome tables.
I'd like to generate some handsome tables too.
Can I ask if you made the source code for your tool available?
If you were writing your tool, from scratch, would you use the same graphics package?
If not, which would you recommend?
The tables are simply html and css, swiped and adapted from somewhere else which I can't remember exactly where from now. Just look at the html source and you'll see the CSS in all it's glory. henrik•talk17:30, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
Stats
I got this line: Megan_Baker has been viewed 739 times in 200902. Does that mena: Megan_Baker has been viewed 739 times in 2002-2009? Debresser (talk) 13:04, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
I think you've done a great service to Wikipedia by adding the page stats within the history tab of each page. I use it regularly to check the hits on various pages. I'm wondering, would it be difficult to add basic statistical analysis measures, such as Mean, Median, Mode, and Range to the page? I know that I, along with many others, would appreciate the small addition. Either way, great job.
Hi, thanks for your edits; there are a few good things there, but it's now longer than I think is desirable. Did you think admins' role is not expressed in terms that are not positive enough? I'm open to suggestions, but I think it needs to be trimmed a little. What do you think generally about the process (which still has a few issues to settle—one of them, the role of third-parties). In particular, do you approve of the tight word limits for submissions? I want to avoid the dog's mess that the current ArbCom hearings process is. Tony(talk)09:08, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
It seems as though the type of behaviour displayed to User:TPTanque, for which Daedalus969 was criticised recently at ANI, was repeated very recently here. User:Daedalus969 is edit warring on Skywalker's talk page. He is aggressively threatening Skywalker with a block and he is inappropriately accusing him of personal attack. What should be done? Nothing has been learnt. Paul Beardsell (talk) 18:31, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
This is a complete fabrication. I was not edit warring. Every time I left a note on SkyWalker's page, it was new, not once did I revert, or save a version close to a revert. SkyWalker was saving his reverts with edit summeries of user is total nuts. That is a personal attack.— DædαlusContribs20:34, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
First you need to understand why iam angry. That user keeps on adding csd template on newly created. Time must be given to establish notability. I tend to get angry on such people who does not understand other people. Seriously i have added many sources on the article below the external links to establish notability and yet that user added a A7 csd template. Adding that template is unwarranted and uncalled for. Iam not sure how many article he keeps on adding csd template and how people he provokes. How i can create a friendly environment when they are people who provokes other people unnecessary?. I do hope you will understand. --SkyWalker (talk) 02:22, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
I do understand; I'd probably be none too happy myself. But ChildofMidnight posted some good advice on your talk on a good way to respond, even when provoked. Also: These days articles really need to be able to stand on their own legs from the beginning, developing stubs in userspace and then moving them is a good plan - that's what I usually do. henrik•talk05:25, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
I didn't add it multiple times. I reverted your removal of it because article creators are not allowed to remove CSD templates from articles they created themselves.— DædαlusContribs02:28, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
Your rigid interpretation of policy is none too helpful. SkyWalker is a longstanding editor, why didn't you just post a question and explain your rationale on the article talk or his talk page instead? Wikipedia won't fall over if deleting an article takes a few minutes longer. henrik•talk05:25, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
Responding to provocation by escalating the situation is strongly discouraged. In any case, looking further in your edit history, I must say I am troubled - I'll follow up with a longer comment on your talk page. henrik•talk05:51, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
I will await to hear what you are referring to. As to further escalating, I do not see how what I did further escalated anything. He insulted me twice, in response, I left two warnings, one for the removal CSD template of a page he created himself, and another for personally attacking me. I didn't think of him as an experienced editor, as he attacked me twice because I nominated his article for deletion.— DædαlusContribs05:56, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
Further, if a user insults me, I have been told to warn them, and not respond back with incivility. You seem to suggest that I do something different, what exactly would that be?— DædαlusContribs05:58, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
As a note, I shall not make any further edits, as of this post, until you have replied to me. I do realize that I have made several bad mistakes recently. I realize that about 40 percent of my edits are in the user talk space.. that is mostly from reverting vandalism, or arguing with others, but it is also because I don't trust in my ability to write articles. They're just like the school essays.— DædαlusContribs09:21, 8 April 2009 (UTC)
It took a bit longer than expected, but the server is actually up now. Now we're just waiting for the DNS changes to propagate through the net so it can be accessed. henrik•talk13:29, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
Stats have already made a lasting impact
09-April-2009: (subtopic) While the stat-server is being renamed, this is a good time to recognize the impact that it has already made:
I have seen new articles, whose titles had zero prior interest, become viewed hundreds per month.
The stats have proven an article-title doesn't need to be requested or spammed in navboxes, but just by existing, an article title can get hundreds of hits per month.
Articles about U.S. subjects translated to German, can get 25%-50% of the English-WP hit level, even though they don't concern Germanic culture (and vice versa: German articles can get 50% of German-level hits when in English).
Some article-titles, requested hundreds of times per day (for 2 years), only got created due to the known stat-counts.
Even if an article is requested hundreds of times per day, "no one" else will create it, even after a full year of requests.
(Few people realize they want the same article as others, so no one creates it.)
An article with a grandstanding vanity-box "This article has hideous problems, please help" might go more than 28,000 pageviews with no improvements.
A hot-topic article-title, requested by thousands of hits in one week, might become totally forgotten the next week, with hits less than 8 per month, afterward.
Rare articles, with some marginal interest, typically log more than 50 hits per month.
Articles about common words (such as: river, spoon, table or sky) typically receive 500-1500 hits per day.
Popular articles, viewed 1000 times per day, might not get edited often: editing or vandalizing is not directly tied to reader popularity, but rather the cultural impact of the article.
Due to the stat-counts, article-titles now exist that handle thousands of hits per day (which were previously missing).
Very interesting. Will there ever be a listing of "most requested" pages that don't exist? A listing of most viewed pages with major "needing work" tags might also be nice. Anyway, sorry to drive by comment, but I think the stat results are neat. ChildofMidnight (talk) 16:04, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
Sure. Feel free to have him contact me on my talk page. I've got a little experience with guys who come in and want to do good/help, but don't know the wiki ways... — BQZip01 —talk17:39, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi, how can I extract the raw numbers for a page for importing into a spreadsheet? I can see them on the graphs provided but I'm just wanting the raw numbers. Alex Sims (talk) 00:56, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
No, not really - I've only mentioned it here some times and Melancholie is very helpful. I should update the site to mention the json output. :) henrik•talk06:31, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
There are some days in which the stats collection has been broken (for various reasons) - those show up as zero views for the day. No, as far as I know there wasn't any systematic collection before Dec 2007. henrik•talk05:19, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
It seems to happen a lot on the first day of the month, and there is also an extra day for that month. For the link I gave, there are 32 entries. For many of the months there are extra days and random zeros at the beginning or end. Perhaps a broken for loop somewhere? --Odie5533 (talk) 13:54, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, it's a bit broken - the numbers in the json output are zero based, but I counted days starting at one. That resulted in the first number always being zero and there being 32 instead of 31 entries. That's now fixed. But to make it a little bit easier to handle automatically all months are still have same length of 31 days; any extra entries will be zero. henrik•talk15:13, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
I think you've introduced a new bug in your fix. The graph has an extra entry at the beginning while the json is missing the first of the month's entry. This only happens on some months. For instance, Nov 08 is fine. Also, if you ever get bored, a Y-M-D\tCount listing for a full article would be much appreciated. Thanks again for the site. --Odie5533 (talk) 16:12, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
(unindent) Argh! I knew having slightly different database formats for different months come back to bite me. Grumbl. Thanks for pointing it out though! I'll work on a fix. henrik•talk16:18, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
How do you get the stats from Wikipedia? Is the site run on the toolserver or something? Do you mind if I download lots of page view data archives from you? Also, what's your database look like, perhaps I or another database designer could help. --Odie5533 (talk) 17:19, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
I am confounded as to why my article: The Cult of Herodotus, has been deleted.
At the bottom of the article, I clearly stated its relevance to Wikipedia and demonstrated why it meets the all the requirements of inclusion. If there is some point that you still find to be unclear, please inform me immediately and I will surely be able to rectify it immediately, otherwise there is no reason for it not to appear on Wikipedia.
Please write back to let me know when you have put it back up.
thank you for your response. it is very difficult for me to provide a credible source for this information as this is a "secret" cult. I am not, however, just making it up on a whim with my mates at a pub or whatever. This is indeed a very real happening that takes place in the woods near my home every year on the last full moon of autumn.
as it is both factual and spiritual, i really believe it has every right to be on wikipedia, not just as some sort of a joke. it is an annual event! also, there is a link to a video included that proves this does happen, with the masks and everything.
the cult of herodotus is fact, a mysterious fact, i grant you, but it is a fact.
if you still really, really have a problem with it and won't allow it back onto wikipedia, please humour me with a more detailed explanation as to why or as to a means that i might verify this by definition through a 'source'. i mean, how do people writing about apparitions quote sources? how is that credible? i'm not talking about a real supernatural experience here, just about an actual gathering of people whose intentions are to summon a spirit, not dissimilar to seances or invoking the holy spirit at an evangelical church.
I was pointed to your tool after a query here. It is quite an achievement! It answers one question very well. I'd be interested in knowing a couple of other things: how many people (or unique computers) access the main page on an average day? Sometimes I go back several times in one session or day to the main page, so that will boost its apparent popularity. Secondly, is there a tool to show how many click-throughs an article gets? Let's say it was the featured article of the day, or one of the others mentioned on the main page. What effect will that have on the traffick? Thanks for any help you can offer! BrainyBabe (talk) 14:54, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
Ah, a question in two parts. :)
(i) No, there's no way to filter out non-unique requests from the data we have now. It's difficult both from performance and privacy reasons, plus it is not obvious it would increase the accuracy: A lot of people sit behind proxy servers which cause them to share a single IP, balancing out those who for whatever reason accesses the page more than once.
(ii) If you're just interested in the traffic stats for the featured article of the day, you'll have to do some manual work and find the article from the archives and click the stats link in the history tab. If you're interested in click-throughs ("what percentage of main page viewers read the featured article?") the easiest way to check would be to divide the main page numbers with the ones for the featured article for a given time period.
In general, the tool only presents the raw data: More sophisticated interpretation of that data is left to the people viewing it. :) henrik•talk15:31, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
Re (i), fair point about privacy. It is a guess that the two factors balance each other out, but a reasonable guess.
Re (ii), I've had some interesting answers from the Helpdesk query (linked above), which provided links to previous experiments. BrainyBabe (talk) 23:09, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia Stats
Hello Henrik,
You have done awesome work with the stats visualization of page views of the various wiki articles. I did have one question though. Is it possible to further tag this traffic data by Geography?
I'm not quite sure how that would work? See the most viewed stuff within a radius? Interesting idea, that. henrik•talk17:48, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
Page rank question for your stats.grok.se
Hi Henrik,
Many thanks for the excellent service you have provided at stats.grok.se.
I have a question about ranking, however. Two, in fact.
First, I assume the rank is independent of the actual data slice selected? This is because the rank stays the same for any data slice selected. So I assume the rank is averaged out over all available data?
Second, I wanted to compare a set of pages (covering religious topics). However, when I came to "Secular Humanism", the data slices were available (e.g. for 200903), but no ranking was shown.
While I could construct my own ranks -- simply by accessing your site for all 2008 data slices and then collating the results for the pages I am interested in -- I thought I would ask you first if there is any "cut-off" in your rankings -- say at 10,000 or something?
On 17 April, 2009, In the news was updated with a news item that involved the article The Pirate Bay trial, which you substantially updated. If you know of another interesting news item involving a recently created or updated article, then please suggest it on the In the news candidates page.
Nice feature. How about adding cumulative entries rather than just monthly? For total visits by year (with an accompanying graph to visualize traffic rates and patterns) and just plain total to date, all visitors all years. These would be most useful and user-friendly additions to your beta release. Thank you. Keep up the good work. Wikiuser100 (talk) 14:57, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
There's some preliminary support for viewing entire years, just remove the month from the URL and you'll see the entire years worth of stats. I'm missing some data in the right format, so some months are missing. The other is a good idea, I'll consider it when I have time to do implement it. It's a bit tricky, since it'll need to be fast enough. henrik•talk15:42, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Häddsupp
I made an attempt at a copyedit of the war article. I also included a few hidden comments concerning some unclear. If I did something stupid, just revert it. If you think any of my queries are unclear, just let me know and I'll clarify on the talkpage.
Wow! Great! *bows to your superior copyediting* I probably went a bit overboard on the superlatives, good work on trimming them back. I'll work on trying to expand the unclear bits, the comments are very helpful. BTW, just one minor thing: Fulfillment is also an acceptable spelling, it's one of those UK vs US things: the two-'l' version is mainly UK spelling, while the three-'l' spelling is US English. Funnily enough, travelled vs. traveled is the opposite. I'll probably try to go with a consistent US English spelling in this case. henrik•talk19:25, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Stats defaults to previous month
When I check stats /latest/ defaults to " in 200903", which is last month. Does this usually display the last 30 days? Also, is it possible to use json to get a page's entire history, and its monthly stats, rather than just last month's stats? –MT18:48, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
No, it currently displays the previous month: The /latest/ URL was meant to eventually display the last 30 days: I'm working on a new version of the site which will do just that. henrik•talk19:27, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
I don't understand why you did this. The user was posting a profile of Medisave UK on behalf of the company; their comments admit as much. They had standard poor arguments for why they should be allowed to list themselves. It is not the username only that is a problem; the problem is WP:COI. I'll leave it up to you to decide if this was a mistake or not; if not, I hope you'll keep a close eye on the situation. I don't see it ending well. Mangojuicetalk20:24, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
I'm indeed keeping a close eye on the situation and had coordinated the unblock with blocking admin User:Juliancolton off-wiki before taking any actions. It is an attempt to test out a different approach to initial problematic (COI/spam/promotional) users. henrik•talk20:30, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
I think that's a fine template to use when a user really has done nothing wrong, as in a case where a user has a company username but hasn't edited yet. But in a lot of cases, these users are pushing for directory entries on their company... if we are to treat that gently, that's one thing, but I think it's not good to tell them they've done nothing wrong in such a case. Mangojuicetalk23:41, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
Yes, that's a good point. It would probably be better to explain that we're not really being a business directory with a similarly friendly message rather than focus on the username. henrik•talk05:09, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Stats page
I've noticed some irregularities on the stats page...
My first is with [3] which shows 1 visit for a page that was never created(unless it was deleted and hidden).
Sure, all accesses are recored: not only the ones for existing pages. If you click this link, Iraq wae a hit will show up again in tomorrows stats. henrik•talk08:21, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
I was talking with my friend, and he says that ninjas are more powerful than a Spartan Warrior. Who do you think would win in a fight?
Sentry2 (talk) 13:52, 22 April 2009 (UTC)Sentry2
april 22, 09
9:51
If you want to mentor and help him, I'll unblock (after he's said who his sockpuppets are, anyway) but truth be told, you might want to think about how much of your volunteer time you'd want to give towards dealing with an editor with that kind of contrib history. Gwen Gale (talk) 14:59, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
It's part of a longer term project I have to engage with problem users and see what kind of approaches that work. Is trying to reform them successful? How should we best explain our policies and principles to new users? How can trolls and misguided users be told apart? It might be moot in this particular case though, last comment he gave was somewhat resigned. (I imagine the sock might simply be his IP address, it has some contributions over a decent amount of time) henrik•talk15:04, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
With a background in psychology and a deep interest in sociology, I have recently taken to the fascinating study of the development of online communities. Obviously, the Wikipedia community one such community. As much as I might be a "project," consider yourselves "projects" as well. I have extensive contacts within the "government 2.0" sphere and intend to widely circulate my observations to compare my experiences with others.
FYI, with the transparency afforded by Talk pages, it would behoove gardeners to refrain from posting comments intended to offend other users when they themselves are criticizing potentially offensive behavior of others.
In some aspects, we're all projects of others in the study human interactions, so please feel free to study me and others - I'd be very much interested in the results. I didn't mean any offense in somewhat circumstantially calling you a 'project', but my initial goal in engaging this was to gain a better understanding on how to improve the experience for you and people like you in general. As it turns out, you have plenty of good ideas and are interested in the same subject, so that was lucky. :) henrik•talk09:54, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
Appreciation for your steadfastness
I want to commend you on your help in sorting out the admin ugliness that recently occurred. I'm surprised at the continued lack of civility, maturity, and humility. I suppose I should simply come to expect that responses like yours are now the minority on Wikipedia and that most gardeners would simply like to ban any more users from entering the space (we call this the "please let me in! OK, now that I'm in, lock the door!" effect). While I will continue to use and track the evolution of Wikipedia, I will keep my contributions to a minimum as I simply do not have the time to invest in learning all of the requirements necessary for participating without getting a talk page full of hate mail. Thanks again! Waykup (talk) 19:23, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
Thank you. I hope you'll amend your blog to include the fact that not all of us gardeners are bad :) Seriously, bad experiences can happen and do happen far too frequently - but not all is bad at Wikipedia. Most of my interactions with other users here are pleasant. A few bad experiences isn't a reason to stay way for ever, so I hope you'll reconsider and give us another chance in the future. henrik•talk19:34, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
While it isn't a new trend, a number of users and admins alike are leaving their light of AGF at the grave and are instead patrolling Wikipedia with steel blades obsessively nominating articles for deletion and using sensationalism to counter logical arguments. Still, there are admins and users such as henrik who do remain polite and genuine despite the growing incivility, asinine behavior, and ignorance of others. Hopefully you will as Henrik said reconsider and give Wikipedia another chance.Smallman12q (talk) 22:41, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
Ah-ha! The "resistance" emerges! :) Yes, I'm beginning to realize there are still those on the good side of the Force. Perhaps my faith in Wikipedia can one day be restored... Waykup (talk) 23:55, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
I tried to search if someone had already asked you this question, but I couldn't find anything like it, so sorry if everyone asks you the same question like this. Does your statistics site pay attention, ie makes difference, between human views and Wikipedia bots, or maybe search engine spiders? I took a look at some of pages, and I wander is it all "real" views, or I have to take into account that web spiders and wikipedia bots crawl over all Wikipedia pages all the time and make us think a page is viewed more than it really is. Thank you in advance for your response. --Дарко Максимовић (talk) 00:54, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
All accesses are recorded, there are no provisions that I know of for filtering out search engine crawlers (most wikipedia bots use the API which I don't believe is counted). I would expect that noise to be fairly insignificant on popular articles though: It seems barely noticeable on even very minor articles (Xiafs and Versorium are two very obscure articles, getting maybe 10 views a day). Even if all those views are web crawlers and bots trawling through wikipedia, it wouldn't alter the statistics noticably on a more popular page. henrik•talk09:18, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
Hi Henrik, the traffic-counter is superb. Couldn't one create another tool that shows links from outside: Webpages that link to a certain article - not from within wikipedia, nor from one any of the clones but from regular sites. It would be immensely interesting to see whether journalists or professionals discuss a certain Wikipedia article. I know it would need spiders to crawl the web for that purpose, but maybe Google could offer the information, and maybe the main problem is to delete all Wikipedia-produced references (i.e. those of other Wikipedias and those of clones). Maybe you are the wrong person to ask and you know who should know.
PS my own web provider offers a special analysis of traffic and where it comes from - that would be the ideal thing, to know how much traffic my article gets from where. --Olaf Simons (talk) 14:37, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
— 16 March 2009
: 20 April 2009
