Research:Wikistats metrics/Bytes

Wikistats Metrics | Bytes

When an edit is made, it can add, remove, or both add and remove content. But all Wikistats has access to right now is the difference in the length of the page before and after the edit. So, if a user added 100 bytes but removed 80 bytes from somewhere else, we count that they added 20 bytes. In the future, we hope to improve this and measure the net change as 20 and the absolute change as 180. For now, we just measure 20 bytes in this case. But these differences can also be negative, so when we add them up, we measure them in two ways, net and absolute.

Net Bytes Difference

The sum of the differences in bytes made by each edit (or revision), including edits on redirects. The metric can be split and filtered by Editor Type and Page Type.

Absolute Bytes Difference

The sum of the absolute differences in bytes made by each edit (or revision), including edits on redirects. In other words, counting negative differences as positive. The metric can be split and filtered by Editor Type and Page Type.

Deletion Drift

The original Wikistats did not count edits if the page they were made on was deleted. We are doing the same thing in Wikistats 2 for now, which means you may see metric totals shifting over time (as pages are deleted). We're working on a way to optionally include activity on deleted pages with a filter, which would keep the totals the same but the split between deleted/active revisions shifting over time. This would apply to edits, editors, activity levels, etc. Stay tuned as we work on adding this functionality.