Sunday, November 20, 2005

WSUWiki Initial Log Analysis Result - Month of November 2005

I'm running a log analysis tool called Awstats against the logs of some of our applications.

I downloaded the result into Excel, and do a little massaging on the data - Basically, I separated all the "action=" with the pages-URL. Among all "action=" pages, I added the counts of "action=edit", and "action=submit" together. They are both generated by the process of editing (Edit, Preview, Save). Among all individual pages, I added /index.php and /index.php/Main_Page together. They are basically the same page.

Here is the top 10 most viewed Pages-URL:

Pages-URL Viewed EntryExit
Main_Page 1447442246
Chinese_Calendar_2006 622 405 122
Cultural_Politics_of_Sport:_Annotated_Bibliography 301 104 42
Fix_Outlook_2003_Phonebook_Issue 236 170 51
Chinese_Calendar_2005 197 125 43
Special:Search 120 4 16
Category:CES_308_RKing 98 3 0
User:Krussell07/CES_308 9130
Category:CoursePagelist 891 0
History_Of_Sport8324

Notice that both Chinese Calendars are high on the list, I am pleasantly surprised.

But then, as I look more... I was even more surprised. I have only promoted the URL of the AAPI page to the asian groups. It's been over a month ago. Being too caught up at my main duty, I admit I haven't done much since then.
But the two Chinese Calendars (linked from the AAPI page) are on the top 10 most visited list, but not the AAPI page itself.
They have very high "Entry" counts. Apparently, once people found those calendar pages, they bookmarked them.
The 2006 version has a much higher "Viewed" count then the 2005 version. (Due to student groups planning on events and gatherings of next year... e.g. looking at when the Chinese New Year is, maybe?)

Among the top 5, the "Entry" counts are several times higher than the "Exit" counts. This implies that once people visit a page (and find it useful), they also wander off, looking at what else could be interesting to them on the site.

Finally, I added the "Viewed" counts of all individual page.I found that in this month of November, so far there are 6865 views and 967 edits. There are 7 times more views than edits.

Ok, maybe I should exclude "/index.php/Main_Page" in the numbers.
This gives 5418 views and 967 edits. Still over 5 times more views than edits.

People are visiting (and re-visiting) pages for "reference". They would generally poke around further on the site if the information on some particular pages are useful to them. Information here flows one direction only.

Among all the 967 edits, there are 789 counts of clicking the edit button, and and 178 actually submit. (Submit includes both preview and save. This is just the way the URL is presented to the server). Intuitively, I would think there should be more submit than edit... since people may only click edit once on a page, but preview many times before they save their work. The log analysis result shows that it is not the case. There are 4 times more people click on edit, than actually saving their work.

Could it be due to the wiki (text editor) hard to use for end-user?
What can we do to encourage more contributions?

Saturday, November 12, 2005

List of CDs with the Evil Sony BMG Rootkit

Details on which CDs, and how to identify them can be found on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's web site:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004144.php

After over a week of furor surrounding this issue, Sony BMG has finally said that they will stop manufacturing CD with the rootkit.
http://blog.sonymusic.com/sonybmg/archives/xcp.html

But does Sony want you to uninstall the rootkit? Read Mark Russinovich (SysInternals)'s blog:
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/sony-you-dont-reeeeaaaally-want-to_09.html