Let's look around +compatibility
Let's look around +compatibility
Perhaps Diederik' intention is to start from very scratch but I guess it might be good to know what was done before and what is going on around.
Several months ago I became (and still remain) excited by work of Jose Felipe Ortega both in aspects of statistical approach (sections devoted to community of contributors first of all) and software toolset. So I decided to share this info.
This topic is very close to compatibility aspect of project being discussed. I mean that R programming language is seemingly standard de-facto in statistical number-crunching so it looks like smart approach to build software on that platform (keeping in mind Felipe's WikiXRay as well).
Pavlosh:
Yes, we are aware of the work by Felipe Ortega and we will try to reuse parts or draw inspiration whenever that's possible and feasible. R is definitely a great package for conducting statistical analyses but before doing that we need to generate datasets that can be read by R or any other statistical package. We will make available the scripts that generate these datasets so you can always run the analysis for a Wikipedia site of your interest.
I'm also surprised that previous work has been ignored. Probably out of vanity, since there is no mention of my unscientific examination of several frequent posters to EN-Wikipedia-L on my blog over 30 months ago.
On the other hand, I've been contributing to the English language Wikipedia for almost 8 years now & have come to expect my observations on Wikipedia to be overlooked or ignored. Maybe that happens because I'd rather work at improving the content of Wikipedia, rather than writing k-rad code or making kewl presentations about Wikipedia to the general public. But I wonder, having watched so many other Wikipedians who worked harder than me leave -- either in a gradual fade or a memorable meltdown resulting in a permanent ban from the project -- if part of the reason editors leave is that they get tired of being treated as fungible warm bodies, who can be replaced daily with even younger & more idealistic people.
And yes, I agree that this sounds as if I'm whining. But admitting that I am whining won't convince me to "man up" & keep contributing to Wikipedia. If something stops being fun, why should I keep doing it? And if you benefit from me doing it, why shouldn't you do something to encourage me to keep doing it?