WikiTracer: mapping the wikisphere

From WikiSym 2008

We would like to invite you to join us on Wed at 2pm in the FEUP garden for an informal discussion about a new wiki-oriented service we are about to launch.

The service is called WikiTracer [1] and it aims at providing platform-independent analytics and comparative statistics for wikis. By tracking the evolution in content, population and structure of wikis over time, this service will provide measurable indicators of the overall performance of a wiki. The service builds on the successful example of Flickr Group Trackr [2], a service launched in January 2007 that has been tracking and analyzing 10,000+ public Flickr groups, offering statistics on the evolution of each of these groups and largely adopted by the Flickr user community. We believe that a similar service could be valuable tool for people active in the wiki arena, in particular:

• wiki developers, interested in assessing the adoption of their product and the popularity of specific versions
• wiki practitioners, who may get valuable insights about the performance of their wiki and build best practices against quantitative analyses of wiki dynamics
• wiki researchers, who may use data produced by this service to perform large-scale studies on the evolution of wiki-based comunities

We need to hear from you to draft the specifications of the data format used by this service in order to support the largest possible number of wiki engines.

Dario Taraborelli Camille Roth

PS We'll be presenting a proof-of-concept empirical study of wiki dynamics for a large sample of MediaWiki-based wikis in the research paper session "Wiki Analysis, Growth, and Trust" starting on Wed at 3.30pm @ B001 - http://nitens.org/docs/wikidyn.pdf