text:
User talk:Erik Zachte

Please use my subpages ../Statistics or ../EasyTimeline when applicable.

WikiSym 08
Hi Erik,

Have you ever thought about submitting a paper on your work to the WikiSym conference?

It's too late for formal papers this year, but WikiSym is a very flexible conference with lots of room for last minute informal contributions. In particular, we have OpenSpace sessions running through the whole conference, where people can just show up and propose a topic that they are particularly interested in.

This year, WikiSym will be in Porto in September:

http://www.wikisym.org/ws2008/index.php/Main_Page

Hope you can make it.

Alain Désilets National Research Council of Canada Past conference chair for WikiSym (2007, Montreal) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.67.193.144 (talk) 18:19, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

13 Oct, 2002
Hello there Erik, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit How does one edit a page and experiment at Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

mediawiki conference
Hello Erik, I'm currently preparing a developer meeting at the 21C3 in december in Berlin and like to invite you to come there. If you have any questions, please contact me on my german talk page. --Elian 18:37, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikinews demo up and running
Hi!

I'm writing to let you know that the Wikimedia Board of Trustees has approved the first stage of the Wikinews project. There's now a fully operational English demo site at demo.wikinews.org. This will be used for experimenting with various review models and basic policies before the site is launched officially in about a week. demo.wikinews.org will become the English version later. You voted for the Wikinews project, so I'm asking for your participation now. Everything is open, nothing is final. What Wikinews will and can be depends in large part on you. There already is a global Wikinews mailing list for discussing the project. If you are interested at all, please subscribe -- coordination is of key importance. There's also an IRC channel #wikinews on irc.freenode.net. Realtime discussion can help to polish up articles. If you're looking for something to do, check out the articles in development and articles in review. Or start a new story in the Wikinews workspace, or ignore the proposed review system - it's up to you. I hope you'll join us soon in this exciting experiment.--Eloquence* 01:58, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

Unification of the different Wiki fixup projects?
Greetings TB, Neilc, Sietse Snel, and Erik Zachte! I'm posing this message on each of your four talk pages, asking you if you're interested in unifying the different Wiki fixup projects (User:Topbanana/Reports + User:Neilc/External links + User:Sietse_Snel/Fix_common_mistakes + Wiki Syntax Project + Erik's list of HTML problems that he emailed me a subset of).

Currently, we all have different pages at different locations listing different types of problems. What I'm wondering is whether we and the Wikipedia would all be slightly better off if we had one location that contained all of the outstanding problems from all of these different projects. It would be the ultimate clearing-house for problem-finders like us to list problems, and for contributors to go find list of things that need fixing, and fix those problems.

Consider the benefits:
 * One page address for all problems is easier to remember, and we'd set up a super-short shortcut (e.g. "WP:WF") that was very easy to remember.
 * It's easier to avoid duplication by seeing what other people are already doing - for example, I've started searching for redirect problems, only to find the Topbanana was already doing something similar. I didn't mean to do this, but I simply didn't know it had already been done.
 * It evens out the workload - currently one person's problems all get finished, and another person somewhere else has a new batch that's suddenly done and ready for fixing - and it's hard for the contributors to know where to go to find outstanding problems.
 * If we have one page with everything on it, we could list it as a place for newbies to start out doing productive stuff when they're new to the Wikipedia - and by seeing and fixing the types of problems that came up, they'd be that much less likely to make those mistakes themselves.
 * There's a momentum that builds up from having a continuous supply of problems, rather than having a stop-start supply. If problems stop coming, contributors stop checking - they like to see new problems, and feel a part of community project that's getting somewhere and doing something useful.
 * With one central repository, if you go on holidays or disappear for a few weeks or contribute new problems very infrequently, it doesn't matter - someone else will still be doing something useful while you're off doing other stuff.
 * New developers could easily add problems they found to the page, and indeed would be actively encouraged to do so. Rather than a series of independent and competing efforts, it would be one combined effort, with people actively encouraged to expand the scope with new systematic searches for problems (such as Erik, who out-of-blue sent me a list of HTML problems a conversion script of his had found - this is the exactly the type of thing we need to actively encourage, because the whole Wikipedia is that much better off for it).
 * It would make it easy for the contributors to know what's out there - There may be other fixup projects already running that I don't know about, and it would be really good to include them - I haven't omitted anybody deliberately, so if there are omissions, it just proves my point that currently it's hard to know what's out there.
 * As the number of articles in the Wikipedia grows, the need for some systematic central repository of problems grows - and the pace of growth shows no signs at all of slowing.

What do you think? Are you interested? I'm completely open to your suggestions - and to get us started, can I just throw some ideas out there:
 * It would be good to have a WikiProject location (and it does NOT have to be "Wiki Syntax" - it could be "The SuperList of things that need fixing", or "Wiki Fixup", or any other name you like).
 * All problem-finders would be listed in a special credits section (and for the record I'm more happy to be the last name on the list :-) ) - so that everyone still gets recognition and credit.
 * It would be good to have the current list of locations redirect to the new central location, wherever it is, so that any pre-existing links still work.
 * Some basic criteria for the scope of the new project would be good (something like: Covers the whole English Wikipedia; Has lists of problems; The list of problems should be generated by some type of automated process - e.g. software or database query - which ensures that it's systematic and repeatable; The problems listed should be simple to fix, so that the barrier to entry for contributors is low; And it would be good if when contributors fixed problems if we could ask them to put a link in their edit description that pointed back to the central location).

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe it's a bad idea. I'd really like to think it could work. Maybe it's a good idea. You tell me.

P.s. To save lots of different messages on different pages, can we please have one location where everybody can speak their mind? How about Topbanana's talk page ?

All the best, -- Nickj 07:12, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Might I suggest, being the nosey sod that I am, the project talk page for maximal coverage? --Phil | Talk 09:30, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing
Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:
 * Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
 * Multi-Licensing Guide
 * Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the " " template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

 * Option 1
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR
 * Option 2
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions to any U.S. state, county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace " " with "  ". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

Invitiation to join the Wikimedia Research Team
Hello Erik!

I'd like to invite you to join the Wikimedia Research Team which I'm building on Meta with support from the Foundation Board of Trustees. Our goal is to work together to systematically analyze the needs of the projects, conduct research and collect empirical data, interview users, build relationships with outside developers, examine project proposals, and make recommendations to the Board for targeted software development. Given your fantastic work on Wikistats, I think you would be an excellent candidate for joining the Team. That doesn't necessarily mean any further time commitment on your part, but it would be nice to see you at meetings, and share ideas on the present and future of the project with you. If you're interested, just add yourself to the list of Current Members, and I will inform you about all future developments.--Eloquence* 16:14, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

New scripts for TomeRaider
Hello, Erik. Since MediaWiki 1.5, there will be no longer SQL dumps anymore. So please release newer scripts for the XML dumps. I know, it takes time, but we can start with TR2 atleast. So, at this stage, the script that converts XML dumps to TomeRaider 2 format will be enough. 14th september dumps are available, which are most recent, at download.wikimeda.org/wikipedia/en/ for English language.

Historical atlas
Hoi Erik,

Worldhistorymaps heeft een mooie atlas gemaakt. Ik hoop dat de WikiProject historical atlas van betere kwaliteit kan worden, anders dan voegen we niks toe. In ieder geval is de atlas die ik zou willen maken gratis. Ik kom ook uit Leiden, grappig.--Daanschr 07:53, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Your long overdue barnstar
Erik, you've produced outstanding work! Thanks to you, I (and everyone else) can now have the million article English wikipedia with many images AND the text of the Dutch wikipedia on my handheld computer. Save for a few flaws, it is absolutely awesome, and I wish it will become more widely used - it is certainly better than the wikipedia on CD, or whatever else is outthere. Keep up the good work, and hope to get the 2008 wikipedia in tomeraider format too!

Jens Nielsen 14:53, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm blushing :) Erik Zachte 15:15, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

GUS update
Do you know anything about GUS update? I have trouble even finding the people who did the update, sigh...--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 03:45, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Piotr, sorry, I don't know. Frankly I don't have the time nor the energy to work on GUS myself anymore. Cheers, Erik Zachte 01:22, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Jan Steen
This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia, so forgive me for importuning you on these pages, but since you posted the first Jan Steen article I thought you might be able to help me. I am looking for a catalogue raisonné of Steen, or at least a book illustrating his paintings, preferably complete. There is no reference to such a publication in the Wikipedia article, and Googling the artist is a nightmare! If you know of such a publication, I should be very grateful to know the title and publisher. I am really after good quality illustrations rather than learned academic articles on Steen. With many thanks Nick Michael 08:41, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Image:WilliamOfOrange.jpg listed for deletion
An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:WilliamOfOrange.jpg, has been listed at Images and media for deletion. Please see the to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. BlueAzure (talk) 04:47, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Simple English Wikipedia
Hello, I am User:Eptalon from Simple English Wikipedia; I heard that you were in charge of these statistics. Is there muh involved in getting them updated monthly, the last update if from February or March of this year? --Eptalon (talk) 09:25, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Wikistats runs typically within a week or two after new dumps have been produced for all or most wikis. The current dump system is very unreliable and even at best times takes many weeks to complete a full run. So never expect wikistats to be less than 4-8 weeks old. sadly. Erik Zachte (talk) 22:01, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikinews has been hacked
has been hacked with a message saying: "This is the Zodiac speaking. Do you think you cowards can run from me? No you cannot, for I am above mortal things. ЕНКЁШКААНЛЁПЕЦЦААЭАН ДАЛЫЧЫНВКЁШКАШЕАНЦА АМЫНЮЛЛЕЯЬЦЦЫМЬЫНЕ НКЫЫЪЕХЦЫЬЕНДЁЪПХЫ НЦЕХЁККААМПЫАКЮЫНКЁ ЛМЕЦЮХАЦЦАЁЪВАШМЕЯ АШЕЁННЫЫНХАЮШКААШ ЫНЮНПЫЦЬЫШЫЙЪЫЦЦ ЬЬЦЕХДЬШЕНПЙШЬККЫЁ НЦЙПЕЪЫЬШЫКЁЯА! " and more not included. Please notify the appropriate person. This is message is going to all system admins. Calebrw (talk) 04:58, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

 * Plain old template vandalism, nothing to worry about. -- Tim Starling (talk) 05:27, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Traffic stats tool
I hear that your are the maintainer for wikistats in the future. Is this correct?

My plan is to have the mountly summary of wikistats as public database on toolserver, so the datas could be shared with other tools and users. For instance I work on de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georeferenzierung/Wikipedia-World/en. To define the relevance of an object and so the visiblity in the map, I use the number of letters in the article which is stored in the database as psize. In the moment I have no other way. Perhaps it would be better to use your values, because it better describes what people want to see and not so what single people want to write. I is there a lot of possible applications, i.e. Persondata or Most_popular_nonexistent_articles and so on. So a dump with UTF8-coding would be nice. Would this be possible? --Kolossos (talk) 08:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

 * @Kolossos: For THEwikiStics I have summed up, UTF-8 decoded and cruft-filtered dump(s) available (~400MB per month [full dump starting with July] if cut at 2 hits per day (one is background noise)). You could use that too. Erik has more dumps, but not sure if they are decoded and slim. A Most_popular_nonexistent_articles tool is something I am working on, already [not at all easy, pretty intense]. See search terms and wikt:de:Wiktionary:Statistik/Suchanfragen (incl. hits to nonexistent articles). Hits on nonexistent articles are not very meaningful yet (due to scripts/bots/spam; coupled with search terms list they will get more interesting), but I could do an wiki syntax example (partially see n:Template:Popular_articles/wanted too)? --- Best regards, Melancholie (talk) 22:53, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * It look's interessting, because I don't want to kill the toolserver it seems the best best. Where can I find your dumps? --Kolossos (talk) 09:01, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

 * I take it from your text that you mean wikistats by Domas, not wikistats that I publish for 5 years now. For the latter all data are available as csv files, which is a no brainer to query as well. For Domas' stats I got dump from Dec till now, and merged 24 hourly files into one daily file to conserve 50% disk space (with hourly counts behind article title). I also write a copy with 10+ views per day only, which is 25% size of complete file. I did not convert to UTF-8 to preserve sort order. Once wikistats server is operational I will produce the same files again on the server and publish them (100 Gb is too much to upload). To be continued after Sep 1, I have non-WMF work to attend to before that. Erik Zachte (talk) 02:10, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

 * Ok, sounds good. Than talk further in september. --Kolossos (talk) 08:17, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Now we have september ;-). How long do you think you will need for a mountly dump with a utf-8 field to be compatible with the other databases on toolserver? It's no problem if you would need longer, I only want to know it. --Kolossos (talk) 08:38, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, the long promised (and ordered) wikistats server is on the critical path. Once that is up and running I can crunch daily view logs and produce daily and monthly aggregates. What I did so far was with files on my own PC (I got 200 Gb of logs delivered on hard disk from Matthias Schindler). Erik Zachte (talk) 13:26, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Data request
Hi. User:Melancholie mentioned that you might still have the http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ data from July 14 to 31. Is there any chance you could somehow pass that to me, so I can fill the hole at stats.grok.se? Either the original files or merged daily data would be just what I need. henrik •talk  05:04, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Sure, if you mail me your address I'll burn them on DVD and send them to you. Erik Zachte (talk) 05:14, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I mentioned your fine stats on my new blog

Speedy deletion of Image:ThumbnailWikiStats1.jpg
A tag has been placed on Image:ThumbnailWikiStats1.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section I8 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is available as a bit-for-bit identical copy on the Wikimedia Commons under the same name, or all references to the image on Wikipedia have been updated to point to the title used at Commons.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on  explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. - AWeenieMan (talk) 19:15, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Image:ThumbnailWikiStats2.jpg
A tag has been placed on Image:ThumbnailWikiStats2.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section I8 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is available as a bit-for-bit identical copy on the Wikimedia Commons under the same name, or all references to the image on Wikipedia have been updated to point to the title used at Commons.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on  explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. - AWeenieMan (talk) 19:15, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Inconsistency between wikistats and special:statistics
(I refer here to your wikistats site).

There seems to be a radical difference in the count of "active users", which I cannot explain. Following a discussion with Nihiltres, I checked a few other language wikis, giving the following results: Your wikistats site defines "active user" as >=5 edits in a given month, whereas special:statistics defines it as >=1 edit or other logged action per month, so you would expect the wikistats figures to be significantly lower. From your tables on wikistats of numbers of users with 1:3:10 mainspace edits, it seems that the number of users falls off as the 0.6 power of the number of edits, which means that special:statistics should find about 2.6 times more active users than wikistats; that is, the special:statistics numbers seem to be about a factor of 10 too low. Obviously these numbers are way too large for the discrepancies to be a "statistical fluke". I believe both sets of figures refer to registered users on wikipedia only, but even if wikistats includes other wiki-projects I'm sure that there are too few users there to explain the discrepancies. Special:statistics excludes bots, but, as the numbers above show, this has a negligible impact on the discrepancy. It seems highly unlikely that participation in all four wikis has plummeted in the last few months, so something is wrong somewhere! FWIW, your wikistats numbers seem more plausible to me, but Nihiltres has checked the code for the other and is convinced that it is correct. PaddyLeahy (talk) 08:42, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know. I will get back on this. Erik Zachte (talk) 15:11, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * The latest bug fix to the active user count (r41137, bug 15682) seems to have eliminated this discrepancy. Currently the active count is EN: 153,549; DE: 23,408; FR: 15,194; IT: 8.526. These seem consistent with your counts given the different selection criteria. PaddyLeahy (talk) 09:10, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Ah, great, thanks ! :)

Page view collecting server failure
Hello Erik, after contacting Domas, he found out that the disk space of the pagecounts collection server seems to had been filled up. So we lost data between ~13:00 UTC and ~23:00 UTC on October 21 (see report), rest should resync. --- Best regards, Melancholie (talk) 23:36, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for letting me know, Melancholie Erik Zachte (talk) 08:28, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, it turned out to be even worse [also Oct 22]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15177#c7 --Melancholie (talk) 23:13, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

How to install the Ploticus when try the Easytimeline extension
Hello Erik,

We want to use the Ploticus to add charts into our Cycling China website through the extension EasyTimeline. I'm not sure how to install this tool into its appropriate place. I've downloaded the pl240linuxi386.tar package, then what to do next? Should we upload the pl file in the bin folder into the web space through a ftp tool, or just ask the web host to install it for us?

Great thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Adventurechina (talk • contribs) 04:57, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

Timeline
I've imported Template:Timeline of Prehistoric Scandinavia on it.wiki (here), but the links don't appear, they are transparent. I've tried with some other example but the problem is the same. I'm going mad, could you have a speedy look at it? Thanks and bye.  J  alo   15:11, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

 * The problem is known in bugzilla:

Sorry, I am currently not involved in EasyTimeline support. I am pretty busy with statistics. Erik Zachte (talk) 05:32, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok. Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for the infos and the tool. Bye  J  alo   23:22, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

New bug 19438 "Invalid image map generated by EasyTimeline" was assigned to you. There does not appear to be any workarounds other than removing all links. Could you get it assigned to one of the active developers? Aaron Walkhouse (talk) 22:15, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Found the image map bug is already known (don't use ampersand "&" in links, use "%26" instead). Perhaps they could do the swap in the parser? Aaron Walkhouse (talk) 23:02, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia Weekly
Thanks for the link. Strange to hear people talking about me.Daanschr (talk) 14:31, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Image:WW2-Timeline-PacificTheatre.png listed for deletion
An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:WW2-Timeline-PacificTheatre.png, has been listed at Images and media for deletion. Please see the to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Calliopejen1 (talk) 13:45, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Trouble with timeline template
Hello! I appreciate your work providing the timeline template for us to use. I've been trying to build a vertical timeline for the Guadalcanal Campaign here using the El Greco timeline as a model. I'm having some trouble, however. Is it true that mm/dd/yyyy cannot be used on a vertical timeline, only yyyy? Cla68 (talk) 02:38, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Email
I've just sent you one about Andrew Picken. Graham 87 12:31, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia-Statistik Deutsch
Moin Erik,

ich habe eine Nachfrage zur Statistik. Von de:Benutzer:Raymond habe ich den Rat bekommen, am Besten Dich zu fragen. ;-) Hier meine Frage: Die Wikipedia-Statistik Deutsch enthält zurzeit monatliche Auswertungen bis einschließlich April 2009. Kannst Du mir sagen, wann die nächste Aktualisierung erfolgen wird?

Beste Grüße, de:Benutzer:Jocian —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jocian (talk • contribs) 18:30, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * There is always a delay due to lengthy production of dumps. This time there is a longer delay due to server problems and script changes. Data for May will be online very soon (hours). Erik Zachte (talk) 23:57, 17 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Vielen Dank für Deine Auskunft! Die Daten für Mai sind inzwischen online, das hilft schon weiter. Beste Grüße, --Jocian (talk) 20:13, 20 July 2009 (UTC) (de:Benutzer:Jocian)

Anfrage der Abrufdaten/Statistiken Wikipedia.de
Hallo Hr. Zachte,

ich habe von Daniel/Duesentrieb den Hinweis bekommen, dass Sie die Statistiken betreuen. Ich bin leider etwas Lost in den vielen Quellen und Auswertungen.
 * ,
 *
 *

Deswegen dachte ich, ich frag mal direkt.

Ich habe folgende konkrete Fragestellung: Wie ist die Quote zwischen Lesenden und Editierenden Zugriffen auf Wikipedia.de.

Meine Recherche: Die Editierungsdaten habe ich im Spezial: Statistik gefunden. Der Standardwert der Abrufe fehlt aber in der Wikipedia.de Installation. Wir haben in sehr aktiv benutzen Wikis eine Quote von 3:1 bis 4:1, ich würde gern wissen wo Wikipedia.de als allbekannte Vergleichsgröße liegt. Laut Nielsen-Regel müßte ich von ca. 10:1 ausgehen. Der Echtwert würde mich nun brennenden interessieren. Könnten Sie mir da weiterhelfen? --EnterpriseWiki (talk) 11:20, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Let me give you some stats:

 * from : wikipedia.de received 846 million page views in July 2009, which is 28.2 million per day, or 1.2 million per hour or 20 thousand per minute or 326 per second.
 * from : German wp received 674 thousand edits in May 2009
 * from closest figure I can give is that according to comScore (US web research firm that donates us data) wikipedia.de received 23.2 million unique visitors in March 2009
 * from number of monthly editors depends on where you draw the line, data for x+ edits where x is 5:6731, 10:4371, 25:2540, 100:1018, 250:407, 1000:48, 2500:4 (this excludes bots)
 * (expect data for June in about a week)
 * I hope his helps, Erik Zachte (talk) 22:22, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Timeline ampersand troubles
Hi there.

I had a bit of trouble with the timeline for the article Soft Machine, due to the ampersand and colon in the link Alive & Well: Recorded in Paris.

Ideally, I'd like to have put Alive & Well, but I could not get that to work, either using & or various other theories.

I have implemented a work-around by using a redirect, Alive and Well Recorded in Paris.

The template is Template:Timeline Soft Machine (band), and examples of the problem can be seen in the history, ie.

I accept that it might be a 'technical limitation', I'm not too worried, but just thought that you might want to know about it. Cheers,  Chzz  ►  16:41, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks for heads-up, yes I think this is limitation but nice workaround, Erik Zachte (talk) 01:46, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

www.wikipedia.org stats
Hi, I asked this at Meta:Talk:Www.wikipedia.org template and it was suggested I ask here. Do you have or know where I can get stats for the number of hits to www.wikipedia.org from official/wikimedia statistics (i.e. not Alexa etc). There are a bunch of websites including your excellent one which give stats for the various wikimedia projects including wikipedia in different languages and per article stats and the like, but I haven't found anything with stats for www.wikipedia.org. Cheers Nil Einne (talk) 17:11, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Templates for deletion nomination of Template:Timeline History of Chess
Template:Timeline History of Chess has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for deletion page. Thank you. EmanWilm (talk) 19:29, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Time listed on top & bottom
Hi I just recently created Template:Timeline of Bose stereo speakers and I was trying to figure out if there was a way that one could have the time line shown on the top & the bottom of the page. I have found a work around at the moment, but I was hoping that you might know a better solution. Thanks -- Phoenix (talk) 03:43, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry I have no idea really how to do that. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:10, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Damn. Well if you ever think of one let me know. Oh btw, thanks for creating such a useful tool on wikipedia :-) -- Phoenix (talk) 07:34, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia in Sami language)s
Yesterday we discussed Wikipedia in Sami languages. There is a Wikipedia in Sami language (I do not know how they balance between the separate "languages" or "distinctive dialects", whatever is the best way to define the differences between South and North Sami and the other two main languages). There are in the order of 2,800 articles, which happens to be about the same as the Friesian Wikipedia, the other "small" language we discussed.Boberger (talk) 08:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Ran into this by mistake, but I can shed some light on the Sámi wiki, which is only in Northern Sámi (except for some parallel terms in Inari and Skolt such as names of months and some birds, but no real text). The other Sámi languages are not used in the Northern Sámi Wikipedia at all. If you have any questions, feel free to leave me a message here or at the NS wiki. -Yupik (talk) 22:11, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Timeline Classical Composers Famous
Template:Timeline Classical Composers Famous has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you.  Klein zach  05:31, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

EasyTimeline. We have a problem in the direction in hebrew
Hello Erik. the problems are resultant from the UTF-8 encoding support that is not full. the hebrew text turn over in the display. we (in the hebrew wiki) write the word inverted in order that the text will show normal. I hope that you will answering to request her quickly. thanking you in advance. --Effib (talk) 11:49, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I have not maintained EasyTimeline for very long, sorry. May I should seek someone to officially take over. Erik Zachte (talk) 14:32, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I would be very happy. The thing is stuck already years. --Effib (talk) 11:25, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Two Easy Timeline questions
Hello Erik! Is it possible to have fuzzy ending timeline bars (or some other way to indicate vagueness in dates)? I am creating timelines (see here) for the statistics section of National Treasures of Japan. The problem is that for some timelines I only know a range for the start date (for instance between 710 and 784). Using a fixed starting date gives the impression of non-existing precision, so a fuzzy end or something like that would be ♦better.
 * Excellent idea. However I no longer find time for EasyTimeline maintenance. I will seek someone to take over. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:35, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Hope you find somebody.bamse (talk) 18:24, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Another unrelated question: Do you have a tip on how to deal with bars that extend a lot on one side of the typical time range? In my case, there are six bars that fall nicely in the range of 500 AD to 1900 and one bar which would go from 11,000 BC to about 1350. bamse (talk) 11:28, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry I have no suggestion for this. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:35, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Timeline Classical Composers Famous
I moved it here, now that the TFD has closed. Thanks! Plastikspork ―Œ (talk) 23:25, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

CPOV
Hi Erik, it was a pleasure to finally meet you last week though originally I didn't realize who you were! :) --Reagle (talk) 21:22, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

File:Timeline WW2 Pacific Theatre.png listed for deletion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Timeline WW2 Pacific Theatre.png, has been listed at Files for deletion. Please see the to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted.

Squid reports
Hi Erik. There is a discussion about these stats at Talk:Usage share of web browsers. Can you help throw any light on the situation? --Nigelj (talk) 14:19, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Hi again. I don't mean to hassle you, but people will be getting itchy about June data soon. Either that or they'll want to drop wikimedia again, which would be shame as it's a big, useful dataset. --Nigelj (talk) 16:20, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I cant promise timely delivery. As I explained it is not fully automized, I will look into it after 15th July. 11:19, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

A Request for Data
Hi Erik, on a much smaller scale, I'm looking at the stats of a couple of - well, smaller - wikis (and then I try to generate some pics).

Of course, en.wikipedia.org is the standard of all wikis, so I try to put my data in comparison.

For instance, to get an impression of the growth of en.wikipedia.org, I sampled ≈ 1% of the articles to answer the question: "When were the articles created which are currently in the database?" That's of course a quite unsatisfying method. Now, I found the table for the total number of articles, which says that it was created from a current data dump. OTOH, I read that for en.wikipedia.org, no new dump was gathered since 2006. Is there any other possibility to get the data? Graag bedankt! DiEb (talk) 12:38, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi DiEb, that message about no data since 2006 is finally obsolete, since January 2010. There is a new dump (although not quite complete) at, ignore later dumps. see our tech blog why. The full history dump is really too large to download. You can glean a lot of insights from stub dump (does not contain article contents), either for all revisions or latest revision per article. Also there are csv files with wikistats data on , try csv_wp.zip for data on all Wikipedias. Most basic monthly stats in StatisticsMonthly.csv. I hope this helps. Erik Zachte (talk) 23:43, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much: indeed, StatisticsMonthly.csv could be exactly the thing I was looking for - I'm just searching for a legend ;-) DiEb (talk) 21:16, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
 * See first table on . That table follows the csv file column for column. Erik Zachte (talk) 21:56, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks - again - for the quick advice! DiEb (talk) 16:16, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

File:Timeline WW2 Pacific Theatre.png listed for deletion
A file that you uploaded or altered, File:Timeline WW2 Pacific Theatre.png, has been listed at Files for deletion. Please see the to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 10:13, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Timeline request
Erik, I am unsure of how difficult this might be to implement: I am using your timeline script and I am looking for something along the lines of the opposite of barset:skip. I want to go up one line in the barset. I am trying to have two bars on one line in a barset. Currently I have one bardata object and one linedata object to accomplish this, but any adjustments in the plot area cause the linedata object to be positioned poorly. I don't want to use bar objects as they don't permit easy resizing of the plot area. Thanks, Jrkenti (talk) 23:12, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry I haven't looked at EasyTimeline for years. I hope someone else will take over. I did suggest it to people who took care of bugs fixes. But noone responded so far. Erik Zachte (talk) 01:54, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
 * If it is not too difficult to provide access, I would not mind trying my hand at implementing this. I *really* don't know where one might keep the code for this timeline, or how to give Wikipedia access to the code, though.  Jrkenti (talk) 23:06, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Image name generation code
After coming across and viewing your code for Easytimeline, it inspired me to make a wrapper for a php class pChart. I really like how you are generating the image names from hash codes and was wondering if I could have your permission to use the same chunk of code in mine. Endofzero (talk) 01:46, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Please do the code is open source, GFL. Erik Zachte (talk) 21:04, 26 August 2010 (UTC)

Signpost
This regarding this; was wondering if you could post a more accurate elaboration...? Res Mar 20:04, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Squid reports not usable
It's a shame, but it seems to have been decided by this edit that the squid reports are not up-to-date enough to be usable in the Wikipedia usage share article. It's a pity as, IMHO, they show less bias than some of other stats that are used. Thanks for trying to update them a few months ago. --Nigelj (talk) 23:08, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I am now officialy working on streamlining the scripts, in order that they can be scheduled automatically. Please bear with me. Erik Zachte (talk) 23:27, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. Good luck with that. Maybe let me or us know when that happens? --Nigelj (talk) 07:38, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikimedia Strategy Analytics Task Force: question on requirements
I notice you're a member of the Analytics Task Force at the Strategic Planning wiki. I recently asked a question on the talk page for the requirements for the Analytics Upgrade here. Do you have any insight regarding that question -- whether the new analytics tool will include individual page-view statistics? Thanks, Emw (talk) 23:13, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Classical music chart
I'm devastated that User:Erik Zachte/Timeline Classical Composers Famous has been removed from Wikipedia mainspace. I spent forever looking for it today, and had to finally ask for help to find it. It has always been one of my most useful quick and handy reference tools -- a lot of info available visually in a flash. In my opinion it's silly to have the subcharts on Wikipedia and not have this main chart -- because a main chart is where the visual overlap and the congregation of all the information occurs, and that's what people need, much more than charts of each style. Softlavender (talk)
 * Dear Softlavender, that is very nice of you to say. Thank you for that. Erik Zachte (talk) 23:13, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

TUSC token 2de630031101bb0fcc0b3c63b03879d4
I am now proud owner of a TUSC account!

Statistics
Hi Erik. A number of statistics are required to run  a trial  on  an important core policy  change that  was agreed by  consensus. It was made clear by  Mr Wales and the WMF  that  a numerical  study  should support the trial. Are you able to  help? Regards, --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:33, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

 * Sorry I have to disappoint you. I am totally committed to one project for several months. You could try to file a BugZilla request with your specific needs. Or directly ask the people who promised you support. All best. Erik Zachte (talk) 19:54, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report
Hello, Erik! The statistics needs a little update. Can I offer you some kind of help with making it a bit more regular? I can help with writing & running scripts. Wikimedia Ukraine can provide some technical resources, if needed. -- ΑΜακυχα   Θ  09:58, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, the report is indeed broken right now, needs some attention. I am on wikibreak till mid September. Erik Zachte (talk) 09:04, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Hope that reports will be repaired, they are rally interesting and informative — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.19.228.130 (talk) 09:13, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

WP big yellow data page update?
Hi Erik, you warned last year not to hold our breath for the data to become available for many of the columns in the data page, including those on links, database, and article size. I wonder whether there's an update coming this year, or whether the Foundation has decided not to continue publishing those stats, after January 2010 for the en.WP, for example. Thanks for your work. Tony  (talk)  16:44, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
 * There is a wikistats server upgrade planned for this year. With that upgrade enough processing capacity would become available to do occasional full archive dump runs. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 02:38, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Help
Dear Erik. I would appreciate it if you could send me information what page in wikimedia can i do on svg Gnuplot, or in other program that i do this easily?

Thank you

Sincerely, Vitor Mazuco  Talk! 20:38, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Vitor, I have no experience with Gnuplot. You might consider EasyTimeline, but I do not support that anymore, so no further thoughts on this. Best, Erik Zachte (talk) 07:24, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Stats tables
Hi Erik, I wonder whether you could advise on whether the tables will be continued in full form (e.g. en.WP's). I'm referring specifically to columns F, I–K, and M–R. If these columns are to be discontinued, could you let me know please? Tony  (talk)  13:11, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi Tony, wikistats will migrate to a new server, hopefully in January 2012. I hope this will give enough capacity to process full archives again, instead of only stub dumps. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 13:21, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Erik. I look forward to this, if the capacity is there. Tony   (talk)  14:22, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

File:Timeline Earth Geological.png needs authorship information
Dear uploader:

The media file you uploaded as File:Timeline Earth Geological.png appears to be missing information as to its authorship (and or source), or if you did provide such information, it is confusing for others trying to make use of the image.

It would be appreciated if you would consider updating the file description page, to make the authorship of the media clearer.

Although some images may not need author information in obvious cases, (such where an applicable source is provided), authorship information aids users of the image, and helps ensure that appropriate credit is given (a requirement of some licenses).

 * If you created this media yourself, please consider explicitly including your user name, for which: will produce an appropriate expansion, or use the own template.

 * If this is an old image, for which the authorship is unknown or impossible to determine, please indicate this on the file description page.

If you have any questions please see Help:File page. Thank you. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 01:53, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Raw page view stats
Wondering if there is any intention to continue updating these regularly? They'd be very helpful for an idea I have. Thanks for all your efforts. —SW— soliloquize 23:57, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
 * For sure. I have been restructuring the scripts, to make them better maintainable and more robust. I hope to regenerate all files within weeks (there were articles missing), and produce monthly updates from then on. Erik Zachte (talk) 01:19, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Glad to hear it, I'll keep a lookout for them. I have an idea which will make good use of them.  —SW—</b> spill the beans 17:10, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * A small request: When you get around to this, would it be possible to also create a condensed enwiki-only, articlespace-only version of the monthly files?  If it's practical to do so, it would help a lot and should result in a much smaller file size for these pages which are likely the most often queried pages.  I've been downloading and processing the hourly files myself and it is unbelievably slow and laborious because there is so much information that I don't need in those files.  Thanks!  <b style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#000 0em 0em 0.4em,#0a0 -0.2em -0.2em 0.4em,#00a 0.2em 0.2em 0.4em;color:#ddd">—SW—</b> soliloquize 17:43, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Query about a slide used by Sue Gardner
Erik, The Signpost has published an interview with her. There's a query on the talk page about the editor retention graph. If you have time and are not on holidays, you might be able to comment. Thanks. Tony  (talk)  05:53, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Statistics on the most viewed plant and animal articles
Hi Erik. I'm an admin and long time editor of Wikipedia. I'm interested in improving English Wiktionary's Latin entries, especially so that they explain the meaning of scientific names of plant and animal species. As there are too many Latin words in scientific names to create entries for all of them in any practical time frame, I'm seeking a list of the most commonly seen scientific names on Wikipedia. For this purpose I'd be very interested if it was possible to generate a list of the most visited species articles (on Wikipedia).

I was looking to generate these lists all myself, and I looked into it I started to come across your name more and more. I think doing it myself would be beyond my resources, so I'd like to inquire if you'd be at all interested in helping with this project. Just finding all species articles is a major hurdle for me. (There's no "Species" category on Wikipedia. Instead, it seems the only way to find all species articles is to trawl Category:Tree of life for articles with a "Taxobox" template with the "binomial" field filled. Unless the taxobox template is modified to add a hidden category for all species articles then that's already beyond my resources).

I've created several other lists, e.g. "the most common epithets", which lists which epithets (the second part of the scientific name) are the most commonly found within scientific names. But these lists neglect popularly referenced species. For example, the common house cat would never get an entry for its specific epithet (catus) using these lists, because it ranks very poorly (as it's not found in many other species' scientific names).

If you'd be interested in helping with this project, especially if it's possible to generate a list of the most visited species (or taxonomic) articles, I'd be most thankful. Please let me know if you'd like to help or to discuss it more. —Pengo 00:46, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

 * Hi Pengo. I am afraid I have no time to help out on this specific request. As you say filtering the articles is not quite straightforward, and the devil is always in the details, so this could take quite a few hours to get it right, and I'm struggling with a backlog already. What I am already doing, and what will help you somewhat, is aggregating hourly page view data into monthly totals (see two paragraphs above). I hope to publish this within a week or two. With a list of qualifying article titles, it should be relatively straightforward to sort based on that new list of total views per article. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:02, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

 * Hey Erik, it's been about 5 weeks since the message you posted above, where you indicated you were hoping to publish the aggregated page view data into monthly totals in about a week or two. I was wondering if this has happened yet, and if so, where I might find the aggregated stats?  Thanks!  <b style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#000 0em 0em 0.4em,#5a0 -0.2em -0.2em 0.4em,#00a 0.2em 0.2em 0.4em;color:#ddd">—SW—</b> express 23:56, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Still not ready. Several issues came in between. Primarily some nasty data corruptions which I analyzed and repaired from different sources. Erik Zachte (talk) 00:30, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Are the existing files (from Oct 2011 and earlier) accurate? I downloaded one of the _ge5 files, and it seemed to differ significantly from the data at http://stats.grok.se/ and also seemed to be missing a lot of pages that should have certainly had more than 5 page views in a month.  <b style="white-space:nowrap;text-shadow:#000 0em 0em 0.4em,#0a0 -0.2em -0.2em 0.4em,#00a 0.2em 0.2em 0.4em;color:#ddd">—SW—</b> talk 00:30, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Afrikaans Statistics
Erik. There is currently nobody that generate stats for the Afrikaans Wikipedia here in South Africa. I am looking for the 50 articles that received the most hits for Dec 2011, Jan & Feb 2012. Can you help please? Regards. Oesjaar (talk) 16:15, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Wikinews statistics
Hello Erik, would it be possible to get newer figures on this page, especially the comparison between EN and DE wikinews would e interesting for me. TIA. --Matthiasb (talk) 22:48, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Some diagrams
Hi Erik - I enjoy your work (and your blog). I created some pics for the age distribution of accounts:
 * editors at wp on Mar 1, 2012 -1
 * editors at wp on Mar 1, 2012 - 2
 * edits at wp on Mar 1, 2012 - 1
 * edits at wp on Mar 1, 2012 - 2

And here is the context for the diagrams.

I hope I didn't bore you :-) DiEb (talk) 14:00, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

 * Not at all! Sorry it took a while before I could have a decent look. Nice work! Thanks. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:33, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Wikiversity content pages
You once told me which namespaces (besides main) qualify as "content" (thus contributing to the "article count") for Wikisource, Commons, and Strategy. Now I suspect that Wikiversity also counts NSs other than main, because I just noticed that the article count on the newly created Slovenian Wikiversity is almost three times the number of articles actually in its main namespace (then again, the count of total "pages" is actually showing up as less than the number of "content pages"... so maybe the stats are just screwed). I know that $wgContentNamespaces is used to configure which NSs qualify as "content", but how does a regular user of a wiki know which NSs are so configured? If this is not possible in general, is there a central place where this sort of info is listed for WMF wikis? Failing that, can you just tell me which NSs are configured as "content" for Wikiversities? Thanks... - dcljr (talk) 04:30, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Aha! I found it: an API query will do the trick (so, only the main namespace counts as "content" on v:sl: — so, yeah, the stats seem to be broken). Anyway, OK, nevermind... unless you have something else to teach me about this topic. [g] - dcljr (talk) 04:50, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I am not involved in the online in-wiki stats page. Wikistats has is own decision logic. Erik Zachte (talk) 09:40, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Stats dump update?
Hi Erik. I wonder whether you know more about the timeframe for when the stats pages might be brought up to date. The data-gap is starting to be a palpable disadvantage even in writing up some of the interwiki aspects of the Signpost, and given the amount of interest in conducting WM-related research, and the rich and unique opportunities for gathering knowledge about the internet (technically, socially, and linguistically) from the foundation's projects, a lot of editors are keen to see the basic stats on a robust footing. Thanks ever so much for your continued work at the foundation; your work is very important to us. Tony  (talk)  10:35, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi Tony1, which reports are you referring to specifically? Many pages are up to date till March. some till April. Data collection always takes a few weeks after closure of a month, not in the last place since generating dumps takes a few weeks. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 11:23, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Erik, in the big table, for example, columns F, I–K, and M–R, which are blank after January 2010 for en.WP, since November 2009 for the Spanish, and have never appeared for the Japanese. I wonder whether they've been discontinued. Tony   (talk)  11:53, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, of course. These are data that can be collected from the full archive dumps only. The English full history dump already takes 3 to 4 weeks to process. In coming months I will migrate to new stat server and make job better suited for running tasks in parallel. Hopefully an update to these metrics at least a few times per year becomes feasible again. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:41, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Erik. That would be good indeed. Tony   (talk)  03:32, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

help!!!
Good morning Erik. I'm making a graphic timeline, but in some things the timeline doesn't work well. =(

The timeline will be like this:

hwever, if in place of "woof" and "meow" i put "woof woof" and "meow meow", so an error pops up ...

please help me =( and another thing, ask me here so I'll be noticed of your answer (i don't go on en.wiki so much). ah, yeah, could you tell me how to align the timeline right? tnx =) --0ne, Two, Three (talk) 18:19, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

stats.wikimedia.org/DE
Raymond sad you might know it: the stats for de show, that we have 250-300 new articles per day; since years. Not so long ago we had about 400; since years. Same with editors >100; it dropped from about 1000 to now 700? - As it changed for historical datas as well it seems strange. So far nobody on de or Wikimedia Germany has an valid explanation. Maybe you? ... Sicherlich Post 08:16, 11 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick respons! ... Sicherlich Post 07:22, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

CSV files
Hi. I've dropped you a note at User_talk:Erik_Zachte/Statistics -- The Anome (talk) 12:50, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Error 500 with MW 1.19.2 and PHP 5.3
Hi Herik

I tried to install EasyTimeline in my MW (1.19.2) in hosting.

Reading the discussion about the extension:
 * I copied "pl" (about pl241linuxi386) in several folders; in folder "extension", in "timeline" folder and also in "cgi-bin" folder how from advice of my ISP.
 * I have also copied the easytimeline.pl in cgi-bin because ISP said that pl code can be execute only from this folder

So I tried all these values:
 * $wgTimelineSettings->ploticusCommand = "extensions/timeline/pl";
 * $wgTimelineSettings->ploticusCommand = "$IP/extensions/timeline/pl";
 * $wgTimelineSettings->ploticusCommand = "path-my-domain/cgi-bin/pl";

And I also changed Timeline.php and LocalSetting.php with the used folders.

 * Finally I also changed in EasyTimeline.pl $articlepath= "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/\$1"; in:
 * $articlepath= "http://www.common.it/wiki/\$1";
 * and then in $articlepath= "http://www.common.it/wk/index.php/\$1";

In other words I done every things, but when I save a simple chart (SovietLeaders.txtI I get always the same error to the same row: [Mon Oct 15 10:08:07 2012] [warn] mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method FSFileBackend::doQuickOperations in /path-domain/wk/extensions/timeline/Timeline.php on line 167, referer: http://www.common.it/wk/index.php?title=Common_Wiki:Sandbox1&action=edit

Where I wrong?

Thanks in advance — Preceding unsigned comment added by WhiteTigerItaly (talk • contribs) 16:21, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Hello
I'm a bit new to this all, so I'm not sure if this is the proper venue through which to contact you.

In any case, I've been looking at some of your data visualization for the wikis, especially the things you've been able to correlate with geographic data. Is the raw data for the location information available online? I am trying to model variables for language, location, edits, and views to predict certain things like unemployment in a territory.

Thanks!

Hagurganus (talk) 00:34, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Active editors graph
Hi Erik,

There's a current discussion at Jimbo's talk page featuring your at-a-glance graph of active editors. It's been requested that a similar graph be produced showing busy editors only, giving a clearer indication of any trend in that activity grouping. Do you think that's something you might be able to provide?

Many thanks, — Hex    (❝  ?!  ❞)   11:12, 15 March 2013 (UTC).
 * Hi, not sure what you mean by busy editors? Every person is only counted for those months where they reached the threshold. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:14, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Statistics of wikipedia's internal search
Hi Erik,

I found tons of wikipedia statistics, but unfortunately I was not able to locate any statistics about the search volumes of wikipedia's internal search. Is there any source I can use to find out which words, terms, lemmas are searched within wikipedia's internal search and how many searches were made during a month? Would be great if you could find time to reply Thank you very much! --Pianorob (talk) 11:14, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Pianorob, wikistats has no search stats at all. WMF did briefly publish privacy-sanitized search stats, but retracted those when the published data still contained privacy-sensitive information after all. I don't expect them back soon. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 12:03, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

File:Timeline WW2 Pacific Theatre.png missing description details
Dear uploader: The media file you uploaded as: is missing a description and/or other details on its image description page. If possible, please add this information. This will help other editors make better use of the image, and it will be more informative to readers.
 * File:Timeline WW2 Pacific Theatre.png

If the information is not provided, the image may eventually be proposed for deletion, a situation which is not desirable, and which can easily be avoided.

If you have any questions, please see Help:Image page. Thank you. Theo's Little Bot (error?) 04:53, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Google Chrome OS
I am wondering why I cann't find ChromeOS in the Wikimedia statistics. SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm This doesn't match with articles like this. Boshomi (talk) 22:21, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Boshomi, this kind of info is based on the 'user agent' string in the incoming data. User agent data is totally free format, any vendor chooses what data to supply and in which form. So the script needs custom code for each case to recognize OS, browser, version. I created a bugzilla bug report. But we do have a maintenance backlog for these scripts, so it may take a while. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 07:15, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot! Boshomi (talk) 17:43, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I have found some UserAgentString on https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list :
 * Chromebook Pixel: UserAgentString: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 3912.101.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.116 Safari/537.36
 * unknown Device: UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS i686 4287.2.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1541.3 Safari/537.36
 * Samsung: UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS armv7l 3428.210.0) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.173 Safari/537.22
 * HTH Boshomi (talk) 18:28, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Revert stats
On "New Edit and Revert Stats" you said"On many wikis there is a very distinct seasonal pattern for revert ratio. Here you see how on the Dutch Wikipedia far less anonymous edits are reverted in summer, and a bit less around Christmas. Most probably there is less vandalism in those periods, as schools are closed. Perhaps there are also less edit patrollers on duty during vacations, and more bad edits slip through?"

I was wondering if it is possible to have two kind of graphs: Maybe this would make it possible to see that after vacation periods, part of users are reverting are edits made during the vacations (not just a few hours before the reversion, for example). Helder 19:17, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
 * 1) One, considering the date of the revision which was reverted (e.g. this)
 * 2) The other, considering the date of the reversion (e.g. this)
 * Hi Helder. That would be interesting indeed. It is not a trivial task though to build such a chart. I'm afraid I might not find any time to follow up on this soon. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 20:54, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Keyboard for Indian languages
-- Netha   (talk)  11:34, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

WLM
--MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:49, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Wikivoyage Stats
Hi Erik, I've seen that these stats are related to the June 2013 dump. I think that soon the Sep-2013 dump would be available, so I was wondering if it's possible to update them soon (at least to the Aug-2013 one). They are pretty helpful. Thanks a lot, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 10:40, 27 September 2013 (UTC)
 * EZ: Hi Andyrom75, August reports are online now. There were some hickups in June report that needed thorough investigation. those have been regenerated as well. It takes about three weeks before all dumps are available and new reports can be finalized. An unofficial unvetted/draft version can appear earlier here. Further comments inline above. Erik Zachte (talk) 22:38, 2 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Is it normal that the link above doesn't work? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 19:23, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
 * In the past days I've seen that you have updated the voy stats to August 2013 (thanks). I'll wait in the next days(?) the one related to Septmeber but in the meanwhile I would ask you a clarification on the new articles count.
 * I've read that you correctly exclude the redirect (like the relevant wiki magic word does) and that you consider articles only those pages that contain at least one internal link. So I need some clarification of this criteria.
 * Do you consider only the main NS?
 * EZ: No, namespaces marked as content in the API see.
 * Do you check the generated link in the HTML page (e.g. through some template) or just you recognize the sequence page name ?
 * EZ: I process raw wikitext from the dumps, not generated html. I don't count links added via templates.
 * To categorize the articles we tipically use some templates that internally manage the Category istructions and also the ones related to the breadcrumb. In this case the parameters are not links.
 * We also use templates to show a lateral infobox that among the all parameters it has also the country. In this case the parameter is a link.
 * Disambiguation pages are threated differently or just like any other pages?
 * EZ: Disambiguation pages count as normal page, they have much more information than redirects.
 * I'm asking all these questions because I can't figure out why there's a big gap between the number shown in the voy stats page and the one shown in your stats page ...a part the time gap, but I don't think it's the only factor.
 * EZ: I see your point. 3271 now in voy stats page. 2.5 k end August in wikistats. Are there any content namespace in that wiki which are not marked as such in API?
 * In this page you can see that we have only two NS for the content: main (0) & tematica (104). Portale (100) pages are content as well, although are very few.
 * As per your above explanation I'll try to count all the content pages (as per API) that has at least 1 wikitext link inside to see if the two numbers match. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 19:36, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Let me know, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 16:51, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

 * Honestly I'm in trouble also to understand how the NUMBEROFARTICLES works, because currently is equal to 3.290 but through AWB I've counted the pages (without redirect) in each single NS and the result is:
 * NS:0 = 3.101
 * Tematica = 129
 * Total content articles: 3.230
 * Which are those 60 articles?
 * FYI
 * Aiuto = 35
 * Portale = 20
 * Modulo = 9
 * File = 3
 * Wikivoyage = 147
 * But I can't see a 60 around... -- Andyrom75 (talk) 21:36, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Just understood it... it's a wiki bug :-) I've just imported a page with 36 revision but the NUMBEROFARTICLES has passed from 3.291 to 3.327 ....epic fail... :-) -- Andyrom75 (talk) 22:21, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
 * EZ Thanks for letting me know. 77.172.113.65 (talk) 23:04, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I was trying to open a new bug but one already exist since 2012. Now I'll try to make the count that I was mentioning above and I'll let you know the result. About this check I need a further info. You count as an article the pages that has at least a wikilink/category, so the presence of the sequence \[\[.*?\]\] or I have to check their existence as well? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 06:46, 4 October 2013 (UTC)
 * EZ Just the presence of the markup. No existence checking. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.172.113.65 (talk) 09:53, 4 October 2013 (UTC)
 * In this case I think that there's an issue on the wikistats (see comment below). Let me know if I can help you with any kind of test. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 09:26, 5 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I've just check the 3.101 pages in the NS and all of them has at least one occurrence of the sequence \[\[.*?\]\] so it's not possible that it:voy has just 2.5 k pages. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 08:00, 4 October 2013 (UTC)
 * EZ Did you preclude #REDIRECT \[\[.*?\]\] (and localized version of #REDIRECT) ?
 * I skip from the count all the redirects (that in it:voy may contain #REDIRECT \[\[.*?\]\] or #RINVIA \[\[.*?\]\]). Otherwise the total count would be above 4000. To be more exact 4223. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 13:14, 7 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Have you got some spare time to check what's wrong with the stats? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 07:29, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * EZ These is still the possibility that many articles were added in September. I propose we wait for Wikistats report for September (draft will be prerelased here in one or two day). If that doesn't explain, I will open a bugzilla bug. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.172.113.65 (talk) 13:54, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm the main contributor for (714 new articles from January), so I can assure that it's impossible that this 600 articles gap is related to articles created during this month. If you were waiting just for this confirmation, I think that you can proceed to open the bug. I've already did the same for the bug related to NUMBEROFARTICLES. -- Andyrom75  (talk) 21:21, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Please let me know the bug number. Thanks, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 22:40, 17 October 2013 (UTC)
 * EZ Here it is: I have other task to do first, but hope to look into this asap. 77.172.113.65 (talk) 01:42, 20 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I've seen in bugzilla that you have finally found the bug on the counter! I'm really glad about it :-) Just for the sake of curiosity, what's "sha1" exactly, and why some pages have/haven't the sha1? Thanks a lot for your time. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 07:38, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Those are checksums for the raw content of the page (modern version of md5) . This allows us to find reverts even in a stub dump (which has no page content), by comparing checksums. Same checksum -> same content. Thanks again for spotting this anomaly and notifying me. This really was a bug with considerable impact on the overall counts. Erik Zachte (talk) 12:10, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Missing columns, again
Erik, I'm back again to ask whether rows F, I–K, and M–R in the English WP stats page are going to be updated. They've remained blank since January 2010. If they're not going to be maintained, could you let me know and I'll stop asking? Strangely, a few WP stats pages do have up-to-date figures, such as the Swedish WP. Tony  (talk)  06:07, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi Tony. I'm sorry, but by now I am rather pessimistic they will return. The dumps get ever larger, and hoped for optimizations never took place. I'm doing what I can (in 1/3 FTE), but this would require major design update to allow incremental processing, or a dedicated server which can work a few months on processing those dumps, without interfering with monthly cycle". Erik Zachte (talk) 13:13, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks Erik. :–)   A third FTE, you say? We do get our money's worth.  Tony   (talk)  13:47, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
 * It's been 2/3 for several years. But I asked for reduction in early 2013 . Oh BTW for some medium sized wikis full archive is processed, on special request. But this wouldn't be doable for really large wikis. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:50, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Current date for Timeline
Hello. I was wondering if the EasyTimeline template you created has a variable that will always yield the current date in the format "dd/mm/yyyy" such as in the line: "bar:John Smith from:15/02/2009 till:31/05/2014 color:red" where the current day would always be used instead of the fixed date 31/05/2014. I tried using "bar:John Smith from:15/02/2009 till://2024 color:red" but I just get a syntax error. Thanks for your assistance. <font style="font-size:13px" color="#9933FF" face="Papyrus">— PAIRdoc  <font style="font-size:10px" color="#993366" face="Verdana">•talk• 16:51, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
 * No such feature, and I'm no longer maintaining EasyTimeline since half a decade, sorry. An extra issue would be that images only get rendered at article submit time, so current date would do not much good. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 18:44, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Nomination of List of selected countries in EU context for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of selected countries in EU context is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/List of selected countries in EU context until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Ahecht ( <span style="color:#FFF;background:#00f;display:inline-block;line-height:1.1em;vertical-align:-0.3em;font-size:75%;text-align:center;">TALK PAGE ) 17:37, 17 September 2014 (UTC) this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 21:57, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Page views/edits per country
Hi! I think your stats on page views/edits per country are among the most useful wikistats out there. I often refer to them when updating articles on sv:wp on various Wikipedia editions and always find interesting correlations. There's often interesting correlations also when comparing them with current events and trends in various countries. But I see that the stats haven't been updated for a while. If there could be some more updates I would be tremendously happy. And if I could help in any way in making those updates happen, please let me know. Many thanks in keeping up the good work. Best of wishes from Sweden. Dank u wel! :-)--Paracel63 (talk) 17:47, 25 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Coincidentally I updated reports for Q2/Q3 less than a week before your post, but I forgot to copy the files (named e.g. ..Overview2014Q3.html to their main location ..Overview.html). (Next time you can also check this sitemap page (but that is updated manually as well) ).
 * I see you quote the trends report, which is not done often. I actually took it offline recently, as it broke on latest run (no history before last quarter). Which combined with a longer concern that this trend report is not reliable enough (too much unexplained fluctuations), and the expectation that we will migrate to new hadoop based unsampled stats hopefully within months, I did not want to invest more time in the report and do not link to it anymore, but the 2013Q3 version is still online, to be sure. Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 27 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi! Thanks for the answer. Yes, the trends are most useful, as one can get a comparison in a particular area spanning years. That way the underlying trends can be easier to spot, despite the frequent "hickups" in the data. I realise that the data isn't always as reliable as could be, but it's better than nothing. Too bad it's troublesome producing those trend charts. What will "migrate to new hadoop based unsampled stats" mean in practical matters? Best of wishes.--Paracel63 (talk) 00:37, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikivoyage stats update
Hi Erik, I've seen that the statistics for it:voy: are still based on the August 2014 dump. It it possible to refresh them? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 13:33, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Andyrom75, yeah stats are a little overdue and will appear shortly. They always need 3 to 4 weeks after then end of the month, as it takes this long to generate all dumps which wikistats is based on. Thanks for your patience. Erik Zachte (talk) 14:30, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
 * No problem and thanks for your continuous support. One question. Do you think that is possible to have a metric that shows the pages most visited with the number of visits for each page? It was an useful feature available on wikiviewstats but this tool is not working anymore. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 16:50, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
 * There is this but not per month or even one year alone. I loved this one  (as did reporters), but that is 5 years ago. I once did something related:  but never as a monthly job. Erik Zachte (talk) 18:09, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the link, but unfortunately all of them are Wikipedia-centric, while I was looking for something about Wikivoyage. Do you know (or ever built) anysthing about it? The monthly view helps us to understand mainly 2 things: 1) which are the most viewed/interested articles 2) if and how our promotion of certain articles works. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 08:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry I don't know. WikiVoyage is in the hourly page view dumps, compiled into one monthly dump. Second link on (and that page explains format). Erik Zachte (talk) 10:57, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Interesting!
Interesting table/graphics Draft:Metrics for European countries visualized (isotype) Erik. Ellywa (talk) 09:32, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks Ellywa, I'm glad you like them :-)

Stats on Tewiki and confusion
Dear Erik,

I have checked stats given at Stats and local statistics table for Telugu Wikipedia. Why is there such a huge difference in total number of editors (797 vs 42,783)? How total Wikipedians are calculated at stats.wikimedia.org? Also, can you help me with the rest of felds, as the data is always a month or two older and i need latest stats for assessment. Thank you. --Rahmanuddin Shaik (talk) 08:02, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Rahmanuddin, I have done many in depth probes to validate editors counts, and every time Wikistats is vindicated, so I'm no longer doing that. As for timeliness of reports. They are depending on availability of dumps. Usually those dumps take 3-4 weeks after closure of month to all finish. But recently dumps are even more delayed. I can't do anything about that, sorry. Cheers, Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * At least the dump processes have been restarted after long outage, so hopefully all stats will be up to date before end of Feb. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:50, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

fa:voy Vs. fa:w
In the Wikivoyage statistics have been included fa:w instead of fa:voy. Same problem for el:voy. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 00:00, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Please let me know if my question is enouogh clear of if you need any further details (to avoid misunderstanding fa:voy="Persian Wikivoyage" and fa:w="Persian Wikipedia"). -- Andyrom75 (talk) 22:03, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for notice, has been fixed now Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 17:19, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank YOU! :-) -- Andyrom75 (talk) 18:53, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Interwikilink
Could you share with the the match criteria for the count of the interwiki? I'm struggling to find the 114 occurrences on it:voy. I'm asking this because I've tried to scan few NS with this regex "\[\[..:" but I've found a lot of false positive like [ [mw: or [ [:q: or similar ones. And a clarification: 114 is the number of links or the number of articles that contains those links? I suppose the second one, but I'm not sure. Let me know, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 23:24, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
 * From WikiCountsInput.pm (WikiCountsInput.pm lines 2002-2017 (''hmm, not sure why it was coded this way, would need to dive deeper, no time now. But basically it seems all internal links with 2 to 4 chars before colon are counted as wikilink). Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 18:32, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

while ($article =~ /\[\^\{2,3}:/go) { $wikilinks ++ ; } while ($article =~ /\[\[([^\]]{4,}:[^\]]*)\]\]/go) {   if (index (substr ($1,0,4),':') > 1) { $wikilinks ++ ; } [..]  }

 * Erik, thanks for your information. According to:  and   I understand that it counts ALL the interproject wikilinks (e.g. w:xxx from/to voy:yyy article), not only the interlingual wikilinks (e.g. en:voy:XXX from/to it:voy:YYY article) as I was expecting. Is this the real purpose of that variable?
 * If it would count only the interlingual links, it can be used to monitor any discrepancy with wikidata, but if it counts all the interproject wikilinks I can't figure out its use. Any idea?
 * PS To patch it, I see two different approaches:
 * prepare an array with all the language codes and verify if the code found in that wikilink, before ":", is in that array, if so, increment $wikilinks
 * prepare an arrary with all the NON-language codes and verify if the code found in that wikilink, before ":", is in that array, if so, NOT increment $wikilinks
 * Considering that language codes are more stable than project codes, first approach is preferrable.
 * If I'm understanding correctly the following code:
 * @links has all the wikilink of an article. In this case you could scan this variable instead of the all article the following two times. I think it should be quicker and with a length check you should be able for perform just one cycle instead of two.
 * Let me know your thoughts. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 09:29, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Any news for the above point and the one in your subpage? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 10:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Any news for the above point and the one in your subpage? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 10:40, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Artifical increase in statistics of Romanian Wikipedia
Hi, Erik,

Please have a look at meta:Wikimedia_Forum --Perohanych (talk) 04:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Signpost feature about article counts
As you probably already know, the article counts of most Wikimedia wikis were recalculated on March 29th, causing many changes to "milestone levels" tracked at Wikimedia News on Meta. Since then I have been trying to write up a detailed explanation of "what happened" and "how we got here" for use as a Signpost feature article. It looks like this week is the week it should be published (hence, this Wednesday, the 29th — sorry for the late notice), but there are a few things I'm still unclear about, and it would be great if I could get you, as someone who is intimately familiar with at least some aspects of article counting (i.e., Wikistats — not sure how much you know about how article counts are tracked in the MediaWiki software itself), to look over what I have written so far, and let me know if there are any obvious mistakes or misunderstandings in there (especially about Wikistats). I should warn you, I'm somewhat merciless when it comes to the Wikistats "historical" article counts (i.e., looking months or years into the past), but that's only because I (and I think many other people) have thought that they were directly comparable to the current on a given wiki. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that they are completely different than what I thought they were! Anyway, if you can't do this in the little time I have given you, don't worry about it. Maybe you can read the final product and comment there, if necessary. (Note that I'm still working on it, so the current version still has a few notes to myself littered here and there.) - dcljr (talk) 09:01, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Dcljr, I just read your quite interesting and amazingly in-depth article, hopefully in time before you publish. First, thank you for doing this, the topic is of interest for many long-term editors.
 * You say "Clearly, this makes these historical counts completely unreliable as a measure of the "true" article counts in the past." Two comments on this, which both address different aspects of how there can be several variations of a true metric, depending on perspective.
 * First, let me explain a bit: in early years hardly any deletions occurred. Only gradually the need for deletions of whole articles or single revisions grew, at first mostly to undo vandalism, only later the deletionism movement gained a foothold. So for many years articles which were deleted were widely seen as just bad content, which shouldn't have been there in the first place. My own assessment of what Wikistats page counts meant evolved likewise, into 'the total of number of articles which survived scrutiny/cleaning up', into -so to speak- 'the number that should have been presented earlier' (and now is, with the benefit of hindsight). In short, Wikistats is not about total historical articles, but rather about total historical vetted articles. This wasn't by design, it just happened, but I came to see this (and still do) as one valid way of presenting article counts in a meaningful way. BTW the decision to reparse all history on every run was mostly to make any newly added metric be available for all historic months. (BTW 2 I would love to see more periodic publications update older stats, due to new insights or error fixes. This seldom happens.)
 * Secondly, and for me even more significantly, over the years I came to question how meaningful article counts really are. We mostly use them for bragging rights. And like some other core metrics sadly we tend to serve the highest number we can produce to the general public. (I talked about this at Wikimania 2014 ). Many articles wouldn't qualify as such in other encyclopedias. The general public sees '4.8 million articles in English Wikipedia' and thinks of the handful of articles they just read and multiplies in their mind by a million and thinks 'how can that be?' Well it isn't. Many of those 4.8 million are bot created stubs, which I would rather call lemmas than articles in a more traditional sense. Useful content, don't get me wrong, but oddly paired with 'Barack Obama' or 'India' into one countable entity, where I feel these are apples and oranges really.
 * Cheers, Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 14:21, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

 * Sure. I have no problem with any of that. Speaking of deletions, at Wikimedia News, where article-count milestones are reported, when a wiki drops below a certain milestone, there's always a question (in my mind, anyway) of whether the previously announced milestone (and the historical record shown in the tables) should be reverted or not. My own thinking is that if the drop was clearly due to mass deletion of "bad" articles, then it should be like the milestone never happened, whereas if the drop was due to "natural variability", then the milestone should stand. This is a similar issue to what you're talking about in your first point. Unfortunately, people (mostly me, recently) had come to see the Wikistats information as possibly filling the gaps in our knowledge when milestones were reached too long ago to tell exactly when they happened (article counts have only been tracked consistently on a daily basis, or even more frequently, in the last few years). Finding out the Wikistats counts were fundamentally different beasts was quite a disappointment to me. Anyway, I had already realized I should say something about the different attitudes towards article counting seen among "Foundation" types (i.e., what should we report to the wider public?) vs. "normal users" (what's happening on our wiki?), and you have crystallized one big difference in your comments. Personally, I see article-count milestones as significant, but largely value-neutral events. I know many people think otherwise (on both counts). Thanks for reading over what I've written. I mostly wanted to make sure I wasn't saying something completely wrong about Wikistats (or anything else). Now that both you and Nemo_bis have read over it, I feel more confident presenting it to the larger community (if I can ever actually finish the damn thing). - dcljr (talk) 22:55, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I just realized I have another point I need clarification on: to determine Wikistats' "alternate" article counts, the "at least 200 [or 50] characters" criterion is checked on the raw "source" wikitext (i.e., before template parsing), right? - dcljr (talk) 18:36, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Templates are not parsed in Wikistats. Article counts are for raw text, after removing most markup. Quoting the footer text: "F = Articles that contain at least one internal link and 200 characters readable text, disregarding wiki- and html codes, hidden links, etc.; also headers do not count (other columns are based on the official count method)" I don't think alternate article count is very useful (if it ever was). No-one ever references it. But it's more work to remove it then just let is be shown and mostly ignored. Cheers, Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 12:37, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikivoyage/IT/TablesWikipediaIT.htm
I can't get the criteria why in the above link are shown 5.6 K articles in it:voy: while currently there are only 5.145 articles. Could you help me to understand it? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 10:27, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Could it be online article count is not yet re-assessed, as suggested in / Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
 * It's not for the recount (I was one those that has pushed for the fix of the two major bugs that affected the articles count, and then for the periodical count reset). That gap exists before and after the recount. There must be a problem on stats.wikimedia.org. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 21:27, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
 * The number of redirects dropped since Aug 2014 this also happened elsewhere. I think maybe Italian term for REDIRECT is no longer recognized, and those pages are seen as normal articles. I will have to check that further. But regardless we are migrating to stub dumps everywhere out of necessity (last time it took 40 days to generate all dumps). In stub dumps we don't have article content to parse, but instead we have redirect flag. Cheers, 22:08, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I checked latest run, based on stub dump (csv data, not yet published in report), and figures for Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr are 4478, 4288, 4779, 4919, which seems more inline with the online counter. Erik Zachte (talk) 16:48, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I found it. Wikistats harvests localization strings from php message file, e.g. for Italian, and stores them for reuse in local csv file LanguageCodes.csv. That csv file got somehow corrupted, and only contained at some point the defaults (within brackets = default)

it,(utf-8),(Category),(Image)|Image|File,(User),(#Redirect)
 * where it should contain

it,(utf-8),Categoria,Media|File|Immagine|Image,Utente,#RINVIA|#RINVIO|#RIMANDO|#REDIRECT
 * Thus all localized #REDIRECT were no longer recognized. I just reran full archive dump and data looked much better. Still as explained we will change to stub dumps anyway, where the redirects are recognized by a flag REDIRECT in xml, as there is no article content. Erik Zachte (talk) 18:03, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
 * @Andyrom75, see T101519 :Wikistats under counted redirects on non English wikis since January (and hence over counted normal articles)

Thanks for the fix, however I still see some discrepancies. Today the situation is the following: IT	NS:0	Tematica	Portale	Total Pages	6464	178		27	6669 Redir. 1485	10		3	1498 Diff	4979	168		24	5171 while the total pages of it:voy: shown in http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikivoyage/EN/SummaryIT.htm of May is 4964, and consider that we reach 5.000 on April 11th. Any idea?

PS Should the patch that you have applied on it:voy be spread over all the other languages (translating accordingly the REDIRECT word)? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 07:25, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, I did update stored international tags for #REDIRECT for all wikis. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:18, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Do you want me to provide you an updated situation for your check? Please let me know. Thanks, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 07:36, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia Growth Animated
Is available for any WMF project but for Wikivoyage. Could you include it? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 12:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia stats
Dear Erik,

is it possible to get the numbers of Wikipedia articles with higher resolution than "1K" without downloading the 17 GB raw data? I'm using DSL 1000, so this isn't an option for me.--Kopiersperre (talk) 20:44, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Kopiersperre, please download https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/wikistats/csv_wp_main.zip (25 MB) and look at StatisticsMonthly.csv (column G in Excel). Erik Zachte (talk) 20:51, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks, just updated the plot.--Kopiersperre (talk) 20:47, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
 * May you please upload new (November 2015) data?--Kopiersperre (talk) 14:31, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Page Views Per Language
Hi, Here (and maybe other categories): https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerLanguageBreakdown.htm Russian seems to have collapsed in page views (it was one of the top 5 wikis a few months ago): any bug ? --Loup Solitaire 81 (talk) 22:58, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
 * I put a warning on those reports that something is wrong.Most likely candidate: https traffic misattributed to location of data center. Squid logs only contain the redirected message for https, not the original one. Erik Zachte (talk) 20:42, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Explanation here In short Wikistats traffic script can't handle secure traffic (and Russian switched to https before other languages) Erik Zachte (talk) 13:13, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikivoyage/IT/TablesWikipediaIT.htm /2
Erik, how can the count be fixed? Please give me a feedback. Thanks, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 07:00, 22 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Any difference between online stats and Wikistats is probably not related to the bug discussed above, I just checked, those Italian words for #REDIRECT are still in the file. Online stats are not entirely dependable either. They are recounted every now and then.Erik Zachte (talk) 13:27, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

 * Main page now says 5412. Wikistats says 5156 (for end Aug 2015). Yes there is a discrepancy. Would you be able to ascertain proper article count from the dumps, e.g. itwikivoyage-20150901-page.sql.gz, with a script? Or I can give you csv files generated by Wikistats. Otherwise we can create phabricator bug, but there is long backlog. Erik Zachte (talk) 13:43, 22 September 2015 (UTC) PS for faster reply you can mail me at ezachte@### (no spam: ### = wikimedia.org)
 * By now I've counted all the articles through AWB (that for me is quicker) and this is the result:

IT	NS:0	Tematica	Portale	Total Pages	6774	182		27	6983 Redir. 1539	10		3	1552 Diff	5235	172		24	5431
 * If you could provide me a csv that show me which is counted and which is not, I can try to understand where is the problem. In the meanwhile I'll try to take a look at the dump. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 17:19, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I've taken a look at the gz file. This is the result:

IT	NS:0	Tematica	Portale	Total Pages	6779	182		27	6988 Redir. 1520	10		3	1533 ... I've assumed that a redirect is smaller than 80 byte Diff	5235	172		24	5455
 * The discrepancy between the two counts is due to the fact that the first one is made today with the current articles, while the second is made by al old backup. I've made a sample check that confirm it.
 * If you could send me the CSV, I could try to find out a subset of articles that are not counted on the stats. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 19:29, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
 * Reminder. -- Andyrom75 (talk) 21:04, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Andyrom75, sorry for not getting back faster. At https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/wikistats/ there are zipped files of almost everything Wikistats generates. Alas little documentation. csv_wo_creates.zip contains all articles Wikistats encountered in the dumps. Would that be useful? Cheers, Erik Zachte (WMF) (talk) 16:47, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Erik, I've sent you an email as well. Could you confirm me that you have received it?
 * Unfortunately CreatesIT.csv is old (March-2015) so I can't make an exact comparison, By the way looking at that file, I've noticed few strange things:
 * "Tematica:Standard elettrici" article (row 18) is classified as "-" that means "page contains no internal link", but it's full of internal link. On the other hand, analyzing the CSV file, I've noticed that no article in NS:0 is marked with "-", and all articles in NS:100 (Portale) & NS:104 (Tematica) are marked with "-". Take into account that all these three NS are "countable" for the total amount of article (as set in server side). So all of them should follow the same split of NS:0.
 * "Utente:(WV-it) Airin/Immagini scaricate" is a page that has been deleted on 2007, why is stil listed there? It has any effect?
 * "Lot" (row 23889) is a redirect (to a non existing page) but it's marked as "S" instead of "R". Same thing with "Asia sud-orientale" (row 23720) that is a redirect to an existing page. Last registered redirect is Bariloche on 2014 (row 19731), after that I've noticed that all the redirects are registered as "S".
 * "Lot (disambigua)" (row 23890) is a disambiguation page, that in the WMF statistics is counted as a normal article but it's marked as "S" instead of "+". Could you confirm that all the "S" are counted as normal article? In the negative case, the classification must be changed.
 * Could you adjust the above things? After that I'll try to make a fine check (possibly with an up-to-date csv). Thanks, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 10:45, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi Andyrom75, that's a lot of issues. Thank you for being so observant. I won't have time in the immediate future (*), but of course I want to find out what causes these anomalies. For now, I opened a phabricator task at . Feel free to remind me in a few weeks time if I haven't taken this up yet. (*=let me add that I work roughly 1/3 FTE on average). Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 11:03, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Any update? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 20:55, 12 November 2015 (UTC)
 * No, sorry. I am mostly (very) busy with improving our traffic stats. see e.g. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114379
 * How proceed your work on T114379? Do you think that you'll have some spare time to look to the previous things that I've highlighted you? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 20:53, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Any news? -- Andyrom75 (talk) 17:59, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
 * I've seen that the above bug has been resolved. Are you more available now to take back in charge the above highlights? Let me know, -- Andyrom75 (talk) 14:26, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Odd characters in page view dumps
Hi - I've just been looking through some of the page view files at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ and find some titles with non-valid characters, for instance line 27611734 of pagecounts-2014-01-views-ge-5-totals.bz2, which has "en.z '%20class='extiw'%20title='en:'></a> <EF> 8" where <EF> is not a valid unicode character (apparently). Is this correct? What page would this be referring to anyway? Cheers HYanWong (talk) 08:25, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Every more or less valid article url (I don't know finer details of what is valid) is counted. That includes non-existing articles, and apparently invalid characters. The term article requests might be more apt in these cases than page views, as no article was returned, just some standard message. Erik Zachte (talk) 10:45, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, so I can just throw those away. Thanks. HYanWong (talk) 15:28, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Bytes per article
Hi, as far as I know, you generated earlier the above mentioned statistics which seem no longer to be refreshed for some reason. Is there a chance that these statistics will be available again soon for the recent months (and especially the enwiki)? Gyurika (talk) 14:26, 12 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi, yes I did. But these days Wikistats only processes so called stub dumps (meta data without article content). These are generated in a few days after month ends, where full archive dumps can't even be generated in a whole month. I did run a second (non monthly) cycle for full dumps on a separate machine, but that needs some maintenance, and that may take a while, sorry. Sometime in 2016 I hope the current infrastructure will be replaced by new software (by new people) that can handle today's massive dumps better. Erik Zachte (talk) 15:48, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:51, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Incorrect link
The text of the mailing list link at the bottom of https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/ is correct, but the target of the link goes to a completely different page. – Smyth\<sup style="color:gray;">talk 21:06, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

== Your submission at Articles for creation: Metrics for European countries visualized (isotype) (July 1) == <div style="border: solid 1px #FCC; background-color: #F8EEBC; padding: 0.5em 1em; color: #000; margin: 1.5em; width: 90%;"> Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Anarchyte was:

Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.

 * If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Metrics for European countries visualized (isotype) and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
 * If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Help_desk&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Metrics_for_European_countries_visualized_(isotype) Articles for creation help desk] or on the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Anarchyte&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Metrics_for_European_countries_visualized_(isotype) reviewer's talk page].
 * You can also use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

<font face="Papyrus"><font color="#3ab628">Anarchyte ( work  |  talk )  08:29, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

== Your submission at Articles for creation: Metrics for European countries visualized (isotype) (July 8) == <div style="border: solid 1px #FCC; background-color: #F8EEBC; padding: 0.5em 1em; color: #000; margin: 1.5em; width: 90%;"> Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by Robert McClenon was:

The comment the reviewer left was:

Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.

 * If you would like to continue working on the submission, go to Draft:Metrics for European countries visualized (isotype) and click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window.
 * If you need any assistance, you can ask for help at the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation/Help_desk&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Metrics_for_European_countries_visualized_(isotype) Articles for creation help desk] or on the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Robert_McClenon&action=edit&section=new&nosummary=1&preload=Template:Afc_decline/HD_preload&preloadparams%5B%5D=Draft:Metrics_for_European_countries_visualized_(isotype) reviewer's talk page].
 * You can also use Wikipedia's real-time chat help from experienced editors.

Robert McClenon (talk) 14:42, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Lezgi WP statistics
Hello. I can't see here statistics of Lezgi Wikipedia. Could you include it in the next report?--Soul Train (talk) 13:59, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

A kitten for you!
Thank you, Erik Zachte, for your making Wikipedia better!

60423972my (talk) 10:24, 30 December 2016 (UTC) <br style="clear: both;"/>

Your draft article, Draft:Metrics for European countries visualized (isotype)

Hello, Erik Zachte. It has been over six months since you last edited your Articles for Creation draft article submission, "Metrics for European countries visualized".

In accordance with our policy that Articles for Creation is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply and remove the  or  code.

If your submission has already been deleted by the time you get there, and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. 1989 (talk) 07:57, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

Techwiki
Hello. I'd like to ask you something, but unfortunately I can't login to the wikitech:Talk:Analytics/PageviewAPI. Could you allow me to do this here instead, please? Thank you. IKhitron (talk) 00:17, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi, there is a Create Account button top right omn wikitech:Talk:Analytics/PageviewAPI. Doesn't that work for you? I'm not an author of the PageviewAPI, by the way. But ask your question and I'll send it the Analytics Team, cheers Erik Zachte (talk) 03:56, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The button asks to provide shell name, and I'm not a wikitech developer. Thank you very much. The question is like this: Is there a possibility to retrieve langview total data instead of pageview? And if isn't, can it be added, please? Thank you very much, IKhitron (talk) 10:07, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Timeline Soviet Leaders
Template:Timeline Soviet Leaders has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Frietjes (talk) 19:18, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:Repeat symbols
Module:Repeat symbols has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 00:02, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

Nomination of TomeRaider for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article TomeRaider is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/TomeRaider until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Szzuk (talk) 15:55, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Bug at Wiki stats?
At, article count for Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia is reported as about 20k, but it should be 1,200,000 or so. A quick check suggests other numbers are correct, so what causes this one to be misreported? --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:32, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi Piotrus, thanks for reporting this. However I am no longer involved in Wikistats (I left WMF two years ago, to focus on OpenStreetMap, as a volunteer). And Wikistats v2 is a complete rewrite. There is this 'Report a bug' link on Wikistats V2. Cheers ,Erik

Nomination for deletion of Template:Isotype money euros
Template:Isotype money euros has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:51, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Timeline Tour de France Winners
Template:Timeline Tour de France Winners has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Izno (talk) 03:22, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

title: User talk:Erik Zachte