Community metrics

Measuring the MediaWiki community
How is the MediaWiki community doing? Let's analyze the data available in order to see the trends in contributions, membership, newcomers...

DISCLAIMER: "MediaWiki" here defines any technical activity (development, testing, sysadmin, documentation...) under the hood of mediawiki.org and any Wikimedia projects.

Tactics
Proposed:


 * 1) Dream and document.
 * 2) Prioritize based on feasibility and urgency.
 * 3) Setup a first report refreshed automatically and grow from there.

Trends to follow
What do we want to know? Let's agree on the answers without being conditioned by existing data or tools. Then we will see what can be reasonably done.


 * Projects activity
 * Most active: continuous contributions, a diversity of contributors, newcomers...
 * Quality: open bugs, response to issues, user satisfaction.
 * Collaboration channels
 * Which channels are being used for technical collaboration.
 * Population: ins, outs, active, idle.
 * Participation: volume, signal, noise.
 * Contributors
 * Who are we? What skills are we contributing? Where are we based? How long have we been around?
 * Most active, productive, committed, responsive.
 * Newcomers: income flux, popular motivations and destinations.
 * Meritocracy: who has extra permissions, responsibilities, reputation.

Own infra
Several tools we are using produce data. Sometimes the data is processed and ready to be consumed, many times it's raw data.


 * Gerrit for code contribution and review.
 * Bugzilla for bug and task handling.
 * Mailman for mailing list activity.
 * IRC channels for chat activity.
 * MediaWiki instances for doc editing.
 * Events, online & offline.

3rd parties
MediaWiki technical activity an also be found and measured out there.


 * GitHub (many projects?)
 * Ohloh (many projects)
 * Twitter - Wikimedia Tech Staff.

Tools to analyze and report data
Free software is a requirement.


 * Pentaho community edition - see the Pentaho page at Wikitech.

Team
Who is working on this.


 * Quim Gil volunteers in pushing this task forward.

Also wondering whether the Analytics team wants / should be involved / aware.