We need better usage stats

[Daniel Mietchen]

Currently, I know of three ways of getting CZ-generated stats on CZ usage:
(1) http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
and
(2) http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Statistics
for the wiki,
(3) http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php?action=stats
for the forums.

None of these provide single-page stats, although other MW wikis do (examples:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/ and http://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page ), and external applications exist that could serve as a model (e.g. http://stats.grok.se/en/200910/Citizendium ).

Furthermore, there are no current stats on where visitors came from ( http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Top_Google_search_queries contains some non-documented, manually created and terribly outdated data, while http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Google_Analytics_Integration may provide for an automated solution) or which sites link to CZ (e.g. like http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.php?start=citizendium&signed=false ).

No. 1 above contains the phrase "There have been a total of 1,140,608 page views (since...? There have been many millions since launch)" which probably does not make sense if we are using some sort of page caching (I suppose we do).

Any ideas on how this can be sorted out?

[Daniel Mietchen]

I filed this as bug 18.

[Daniel Mietchen]

See also an older discussion at http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,2780.0.html .

[Joe Quick]

At the very least, we should install Google Analytics.

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

At the very least, we should install Google Analytics.

Without having an opinion on which software (I use free Sitemeter, but it was convenient), I cannot think of a higher priority. Indeed, I would ask that this be given a priority with the Charter, as it would tell us things about the real, not guessed audience as it is -- although we may consciously build a different one.