Sources of stats

There are several available sources for stats/analytics on the Irish Wikipedia project. The main ones of note are stats.grok.se and the "official" wikimedia dumps.

Stats.grok.se

See Henrik's project at stats.grok.se. From here one can:

See a list of pages based on hit ranking. (NB: Unfortunately this hasn't been updated since December 2010)
See stats for individual pages. For example An Astráil or Príomhleathanach (NB: Unfortunately Irish isn't officially supported via the forms on the page, so you'll need to "manually" edit the date and/or article name in the URL. But you can see the hits for each page up until this current month).

Official Wikimedia stats

See official stats at stats.wikimedia.org. From here one can:

See a very very highlevel summary for the GA project (Note: This is a summary summary. Henrik's project is the best way of seeing hits for an individual page).
See comparative stats between projects (Note: The "views per hour" column).
See [http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm comparative page view (hit) stats between projects. (NB: Unfortunately you have to go hunting for Irish in the table, it's a little out of date, and it's hard to read at the best of times).
See also charts and editting stats summaries

Others

See dump files here. You need to be pretty determined (and know what you're doing) to divine meaningful data from here.
Also consider wikistics.falsikon.de. This allowed a carve up of most popular articles by year, prev months, curr month, today, etc. However it's quite out of date now.

Historic ranking

Hit count traffic stats for the Irish language Wikipedia (December 2010)

Extract from stats.grok.se:

Hit count traffic stats for the Irish language Wikipedia (February 2009)

Ran this again as the stats.grok.se report is still stuck on last August.

Hit count traffic stats for the Irish language Wikipedia (October 2008)

I probably don't need to run these reports manually any more. As the same detail is now seemingly published at stats.grok.se.

See: stats.grok.se/ga/top

Hit count traffic stats for the Irish language Wikipedia (August 2008)

Raw results posted here. Top 25 below. No major differences from June. (See /ComparisonTable). Though why "22 Bealtaine" so popular, am unsure :)

Trends/Zeitgeist

Total "hits" down from 436,186 in June to 395,350 in August. (Cause: Schools off?)

Selected big article hit increases:

Tbilisi up from 20 hits in June to 71 hits in August (Cause: South Ossetia conflict?)
MP3 up from 197 to 719 (Cause: Not a clue)
Inis_Iocht up from 19 to 77 (Cause: Not a clue)
Cork_City_F.C. up from 25 to 107 (Cause: News? [Financial difficulties])
Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn up from 68 to 299 (Cause: Death. Front page article.)
SSL up from 102 to 449 (Cause: No idea)
Louis_XIII_na_Fraince up from 5 to 29 (Cause: No idea)
Deichniúr up from 16 to 107 (Cause: No idea)
Eoin_Shasana up from 27 to 218 (Cause: WAYY UP - no idea why...)
C up from 15 to 140 (Cause: ???)
Cathal_Ó_Sandair up from 2 to 19 (Cause: Was interwiki-ed from EN project in early Aug)
Josip_Broz_Tito up from 3 to 36 (Cause: Dunno)
Aosdána up from 16 to 198 (Cause: No clue. Increase all came in one day.)
Nollaig_Ó_Gadhra up from 21 to 306 (Cause: Death/news)
Zeeland up from 2 to 39 (Cause: Dunno)
Liam_Concar up from 4 to 213 (Cause: WAYY UP - no idea why...)

Hit count traffic stats for the Irish language Wikipedia (June 2008)

Background

I asked myself a few questions the other day:

"For all the effort that's being put into this project (by me and others), is it worthwhile? IE: Is anybody actually reading all this stuff?"
"If so, what are the most popular pages?"
"Is it possible to identify whether the Irish language Wikipedia project is any more popular than other Irish language sites? IE: Does this project attract more visitors/hits than (say) abair.ie, or beo.ie or whatever?"
"Could we find out? How?"

And I set myself a task to see how many of these questions I could answer.

Tools

There are several Wikimedia project tools which track (serverside) content volumetric stats on the various projects. Including the Irish one. Like stats.wikimedia.org which has tools which show the size of database, most editted articles, most prolific editors etc. Or this charting tool which shows number of new articles, number of edits, etc. (Over time)

But these only shows us how busy the active "editting community" is. It doesn't really show us how busy the normal "viewing community" is.

There are a few web based hit/visitor tracking tools associated to the Wikimedia project. That do give the visitor stats detail. But few/none that actively capture data on the GA project.

There is one exception: stats.grok.se. This has some nice reports - like the "Top visited pages" on the EN project. This looks like the kinda thing I was thinking about. But it doesn't (yet) have a list for the GA project.

It does allow you to view stats for individual pages by searching on EN and then changing the project identifier in the URL. IE: search stats.grok.se/en/200806/Éire and then change to stats.grok.se/ga/200806/Éire.

But the top list I wanted was missing. So I decided to create on myself. And I wrote a script to do it. Results are below.

Results (June 2008)

The top 25 "most visited" articles for the entire month of June 2008 are listed below. I've put the full results - sorted top down - as a subset of this page. (With apologies for how fadas/etc display. Is an aspect of the encoding system I used for the script.)

Notes:

I included some of the "special" pages in the count, but did not run the script against the category, image, talk, user or other namespaces. But I might at some point.
The stats are the actual "hit counts". Not individual page displays. So, as an example, a redirect will be counted on its own. And not as part of the "main" article. IE: Aston Villa (a redirect) shows 7 hits, but Aston Villa F.C. shows 55. I didn't add these up to reflect "total hits for Aston Villa" or anything like that.)
Some of the results are interesting. Like the fact that the AJAX article is up near the top. Nearly five thousand hits? For such a short article? That is only linked from one other article? Traffic must be driven to it from another site. Possibly the interwiki link on the equivalent EN page. Or some Google or other search engine that ranks it highly in searches for "AJAX" for some reason.

Totals

A count of the total "hits" to the article namespace shows 436186 hits over 8966 articles. That's about 48.6 hits per "page" for the month of June. (Including redirects, stubs and other scraps). This is hardly a scientific measure of popularity. But it's a start.

Next steps

I might (at some point) try and (a) improve this count accuracy. And (b) find a way to compare to other Irish lang sites.

I might also - every now again - run this script for updated numbers. (It won't be very often though. Because it takes hours to complete.) At some point (hopefully) the stats.grok.se TOP service will be run against the GA project. In a better way than I can/do.

I might also put a "quick stats" summary someplace also. (Total hits per month, top pages, etc).

Maybe.

Uses?

Should we use these stats to identify (for example) which articles to extend/improve/etc? EG:

Given that AJAX is (for some inexplicable reason) one of the most popular pages, should it be extended? (Does anyone know enough to extend it?) Same goes for XML, Cómhaoin Wikimedia and Blag.
Given that Stáit Aontaithe Mheiriceá is also up there with the most visited, should we clean it up a bit? It's one of the most visited pages, and yet it has had a cleanup tag for a year or more. Same goes for Ryanair.
I think someone already brought this up recently, but, given that the Cursaí reatha pages are so popular, should someone "adopt" them to ensure they are consolidated a bit, cleaned-up and then kept somewhat up to date? (Weekly?) Or should we just retire them as obsolete to Wikinews/etc?

Excellent work, Guliolopez, and certainly some interesting reading. We should definitely use this info to perhaps focus our efforts a little bit, to make sure that we are covering what people seem to be after, and that there's a decent standard in the articles that are most viewed. Maybe all of us who are interested could take certain articles and expand and/or clean them up? About the cúrsaí reatha - I think that it's a worthwhile section, but of course it's pointless or even counter-productive if it's not somehow up-to-date. The problem is probably simply the fact that nobody "owns" it, so nobody feels the need to look after it. --Antóin 17:57, 15 Iúil 2008 (UTC)