Site:Statistics

There aren't very many meaningful statistics on the Special:Statistics page--a page automatically generated as part of the software that runs this site, mediawiki.

• The number of pages in the database isn't very helpful because most of these pages simply redirect the user to the place they want to go. For example, if a user enters 1 Ne 1:1, they are redirected to 1 Ne 1:1-5. Anyway, since the # of pages is based on the number of verses in the scriptures, the number of pages for the site is basically fixed. (In fact it grows a bit over time as the number of user and administrative pages slowly grow.) But in short, this metric isn't useful.
• The number of legitimate pages is just a number that gets manually updated on the back-end. It is usually out of date.
• The number of page views is overstated due to traffic from the likes of Google and understated from various caching mechanisms. (This site uses squid for caching and relies heavily on client-side caching.) Net-net it isn't clear how the number of page views relates to a measure we would like to track--how many people look at the pages.

So, the only really meaningful number on the automatically generated statistics page is the number of edits. Except for a small number of SPAM posts, each edit represents a real person making a real change to a real page.

As this is written, there are over 7000 edits. Thank you everyone.

To help understand what is going on Matthew has done the following analysis of the edits.

This analysis concentrates only on edits to commentary pages and the associated talk pages. As a result the total is significantly lower than the entire edits to date. The analysis was last updated March 11th, 2005. These graphs are not automatically updated.

So here it is. There are 2 graphs.

1) This graph gives you an idea of where the edits take place. As is clear from the graph, edits to date have concentrated on the Book of Mormon.

(As of March 11, 2006)

Note: there's nothing special about the particular pages shown on the x-axis. It so happens that each 300th page is shown starting with Gen 1:1-5.

2) This graph shows how the number edits is changing over time.

(As of March 11, 2006)

In the last part of 2005 the number of edits was particularly high. Part of the reason was that students in a religion class during Fall semester were assigned to make a certain number of posts.

Note: no adjustment is made for the fact that months have different number of days in them.