PBS Wiki Statistics

Mary Sue Ittner msittner@mcn.org
Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:29:35 PST
Hi,

PmWiki which is the wiki software we are currently using has many 
recipes you can add to create new features. We have tried to keep our 
wiki simple so haven't added a lot of them although from time to time 
David Pilling has found ones that we think are useful and installed 
them.  A little more than a week ago he added a recipe that allows us 
to look at how many times each page is accessed. In a little over a 
week there have been 42,664 page views at my last look. I believe 
this justifies all of the time that has been put into creating the pbs wiki.

Our previous wiki kept track of how many hits each page got and we 
had a Most Popular page so you could see which pages were viewed the 
most often. Although this might seem to be a way of determining which 
bulb was most popular, since a lot of the people who viewed the wiki 
are referred by a Google search engine, the more unusual bulbs would 
have less competition for pages to find information so could get more 
hits. In addition we have split up a lot of the pages that we have a 
lot of pictures of so each page won't take so long to load and 
sometimes adding a hybrid page to distinguish from the species page, 
so have multiple pages for :
Albuca, Allium, Alstroemeria, Amaryllis, Arisaema, Babiana, Brodiaea, 
Calochortus, Colchicum, Crinum, Crocus, Cyclamen, Cyrtanthus, 
Delphinium, Drimia, Erythronium, Favorite Blue Bulbs,  Favorite 
Orange Bulbs, Favorite Pink Bulbs, Favorite White Bulbs, Favorite 
Yellow Bulbs, Fritillaria, Geissorhiza, Gladiolus, Haemanthus, 
Hesperantha, Hippeastrum, Homeria, Hymenocallis, Iris, Ismene, Ixia, 
Lachenalia, Legacy Bulbs, Lilium, Mendocino Sonoma Coast, Moraea, 
Narcissus, Namaqualand, Nerine, Ornithogalum, Oxalis, Pelargonium, 
Roggeveld, Romulea, Sparaxis, Tigridia, TOW (Topic of the Week), 
Trillium, Triteleia, Tritonia, Tulipa, Watsonia, Zephyranthes

For some of these we may have just one or two extra pages and for 
others we have a lot of pages. Allium, Arisaema, Calochortus, Crinum, 
Crocus, Fritillaria, Gladiolus, Iris, Lilium, Narcissus are a few of 
the ones with many pages. So to measure their popularity you'd have 
to add up all the hits for all the pages.

When we changed to the new wiki I saved the most popular page from 
the old wiki. The thirty pages with the most hits in the old wiki in 
order were:
HomePage
MostPopular
PhotographsAndInformation
Iris
Nothoscordum
Lilium
TitleSearch
RecentChanges
Hippeastrum
HardinessZoneMaps
Alstroemeria
Crocus
Zephyranthes
BeardlessIrises
Curcuma
Tigridia
Freesia
Amaryllis
MendocinoCoastBotanicalGardens
Oxalis
UploadFile
Nerine
NarcissusHybrids
Hymenocallis
Ornithogalum
Scilla
Crinum
Tulipa
SouthAfricanOxalis
Begonia
Alocasia

If you are interested in seeing the 30 pages that were viewed the 
most in the past week you can add to any wiki page:
?action=totalcounter
It will also tell you the pages viewed that day and the referral 
sources and a number of other things. You can expand beyond 30 by 
adding the number you want to see to this  &TotalCounterMaxItems=
For example:
<http://pacificbulbsociety.org/pbswiki/index.php/…>
will allow you to see a count for the hits for 500 wiki pages (if 
that many have had hits) since David added the counter. You can see 
if the same things are still the most popular (and many of them are).

This recipe seems to self destruct over time so we don't know how 
long it will last, but in the meantime I am finding it very 
interesting. We hope it will encourage some of you who are just 
adding photos to your own websites to learn how to use the wiki and 
help us fill in our missing gaps and make this an even better resource.

Mary Sue




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