Background Material

Participants should be sure they're familiar with the relevant background material. They should also work to identify gaps and collect and summarize more information as it becomes available.

Members

Supporting: Eugene Eric Kim

Mandate

In order to know whether the Wikimedia movement is achieving its goals of greater reach and improved participation and quality, we need to be able to track our results. There are currently limited ways of seeing whether or not changes to MediaWiki, for example, are achieving their desired effect.

Having a better analytics infrastructure would allow us to see these things. It would allow the community to make more data-driven decisions about tool features and community initiatives. Furthermore, Wikimedia is already the only web site of its size openly sharing the analytics that are currently being tracked. We have the opportunity to catalyze great, open learnings by making this data available to researchers everywhere.

The goal of this task force is to consider requirements for an improved analytics infrastructure and propose a strategy for developing it by April 30, 2010. Specifically:

  • Articulate the core principles for an analytics infrastructure.
  • Capture the use cases and architectural requirements for an analytics infrastructure.

Questions:

  1. What questions do we want to answer using these analytics?
  2. What are the architectural requirements for such an infrastructure?
  3. What impact will our concerns about privacy have on our strategy?
  4. How will our choices align to our broader mission of furthering open (source) solutions?

Process

Membership of this Task Force is open to anyone who wishes to participate and who is willing to stay engaged in this process until the draft plan is complete. That means:

  • Reading and understanding the background material
  • Actively participating in discussion, and encouraging others to participate
  • Contributing to the synthesis of the plan and other materials (e.g. summaries of the discussion)

If you'd like to sign up, please add your name to the column on the right.

Working Documents

Meetings