User talk:Erik Zachte

Indeed, very insightful :-) Ant

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't realised I was doing that. Angela 18:18, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

GUTOHH

Hi, I'm Huhsunqu. All right, I'm in, but i'm needing learning more about code and proyect. Help me learning and I help you any way that I can . Saa you. --Huhsunqu 9 July 2005 00:02 (UTC)

stats on bgwiki

Hello Erik, I would like to report that the statistics on bgwiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaBG.htm) are very outdated. Is it possible to update them for us, please? Regards, DCLXVI 9 July 2005 04:24 (UTC)

All stats are outdated. The database format changed since Mediawiki 1.5 again. There will be a new database dump format (xml) some time, don't know when, also don't know when I have time to revise the stats scripts again, probably after Wikimania. Erik Zachte July 9, 2005 12:51 (UTC)

GUT and Timelineoptimizer

Hello Erik, I answered your message on my talk page, and it brought me back to Easytimeline. Today i whipped up a small script which tries to optimally distribute overlaping event bars in as few rows as possible. I tested it on a timeline of wars in the 20th century. The content is extracted using a script from some Wikipedia-Lists. I colorcoded them by hand (preliminary). --Dschwen 17:58, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Help with new wikistat script

Hi Erik,
I'm longing for new statistics. Can I help you in any way with porting your scripts to the new XML dump format? --Langec 18:35, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your offer but update is nearly ready.
Cool, thanks :-) --Langec 10:04, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Surveys, et al

Hallo, Erik! Would you be interested in a meeting devoted to survey development in the next week or two? +sj | Translate the Quarto |+ 00:23, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Wikiversity stats

Hi Erik, well I *always* enjoy talking with you :-). On those stats - thanks for doing that - I hope that's not completely wasted effort(?). I'm obviously delighted that Wikiversity now exists as an independent project. The only thing that frustrates me now is that I have a dissertation to work on to be handed in in two weeks so i'm just incapable of putting the time into getting something interesting going there (such as research, which we discussed at Wikimania). I really want to bring those ideas forward, and I apologise for not replying to your research-l messages - I promise I'll be back to wiki-business as usual in a month. In the meantime, hope to see you at the Special projects committee open meeting(s) (see Talk:Special_projects_committee#Public_meetings). All the best, Erik. Cormaggio ^@ 07:59, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Fork from EasyTimeline to make an EasyMap ?

Hello Erik. As the creator of the great EasyTimeline extension, could you please take a look at bug7849 ? I would like to make it possible to put wikilinks on maps. Thanks for you help :) guillom 08:28, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Guillom, very impressive maps! I did not know this was even possible with html. It would certainly be useful to have a more intuitive syntax for positioning the elements. Not a trivial matter though. Perhaps it could help to feed the map size to a script and data points in relative terms, say

 ImageSize=width:600 height:400 
 PlotData=
   textcolor:blue 
   at:20%,55% text:"New York" 
   at:21%,60% text:"Washington" 

meaning 22% of image width counting from the left, 55% of image height counting from the bottom (0%,0% = bottom left like with cartesian coordinates)

Another possibility would be to specify coordinates in longitude,latitude notation. For many situations these can be easily found or even measured in google earth. The map itself would need to be positioned onto the globe, by stating longitude and latitude for bottomleft and topright corner. A EasyMap script could than translate longitude,latitude into percentage notation as above. It might be useful to allow several variant notations

 ImageSize=width:600 height:400 
 PlotArea=left:72.5W top:39.4N right:76.5W bottom:42.6N 
 PlotData=
   textcolor:blue 
   at:40°42'N,74°00'W     text:"[[New York]]"
   at:40.42.05N,74.00.20W text:"[[New York]]"
   at:N(40.42),W(74.00)   text:"[[New York]]" 

and to have syntax that defines where to position the text relative to the symbol (say align, anchor and shift parameters) Erik Zachte 00:06, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Statistics

Hi, the main index page of stats.wikimedia.org don't have a link to the Wikisource language index (neither to Wikiversity language sites, but I have found the reasons here :) ). And to avoid confusion IMHO is a good idea to rename the sources from Wikispecial index to the current interwiki prefix for that wiki: oldwikisource:. 555 19:55, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Both done. Latter will be visible after next run. Cheers, Erik Zachte 21:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Image:SizeEnglishWikipedia.jpg

This image has no source information. This means that it has an unknown copyright status. Unless the copyright status is provided and a source is given, the image will be deleted seven days after this template was added. Cheers--Nick1915 - ^{all you want} 01:14, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Stats and Wikisource

Gday Erik. Been looking at the stats as produced at http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm and was reflecting with another person that the stats for editing do not reflect the prolific work undertaken in our Page: namespace. On many of the WS projects we now do much of our editing in that namespace, and then transclude the results of the pages to the main namespace, and that for each transclusion there is likely to be multiple pages in the Page namespace. I wondered whether there may be the opportunity to reflect that other editing into the produced statistics. Thanks. billinghurst sDrewth 13:42, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually more relevant pages that reflect the edit patterns may be http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/EditsRevertsEN.htm and http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm billinghurst sDrewth 13:44, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Fix naar redirect

Hoi Erik. Ik heb een link in jouw gebruikersruimte gefixt omdat het een dubbele redirect betrof (ivm een titelwijziging). Zie ook hier. Trijnstel 19:05, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Romanian Wikipedia stats

Hello Erik, I'm a user at ro.wikipedia.org, and I want to do some research on the visitors that access the Romanian Wikipedia. Please, can you provide me some stats on the browser language used by users who visit ro.wikipedia.org (based on pageviews or unique users or whatsoever)? Something similar to those provided by you at Commons. If it is possible, it would be also interesting to see language stats for contributions (if you have time for that too). Thanks. --Danutz 13:23, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Query and a few suggestions

Hi Erik, I like many things about your Report card; this is a valuable resource for the movement. However, will you please consider a few suggestions?

• Increasing the Y–X ratio. The logarithmic scale seems to be essential; but the lines do tend to be very horizontalised—so flat that in many places it's hard to perceive the structure. This is even more apparent in the double-click close-up graphs you get from highlighting a portion of a graph; these are potentially a great idea that doesn't yet work because of this scaling problem. Would it be possible to make the graphs more vertical while retaining the logarithmic scale? I'm thinking of at least twice as vertical, or even three times as vertical, for the logarithmic graphs (perhaps a marginal increase, or none, for the first graph, Reach by region, which isn't logarithmic and has the bumpiness I thirst for in the other graphs). Another advantage would be our ability to distinguish the lines when they hug each other. Would people mind having to scroll down more from this greater verticality? I doubt it, even on a small mobile device, if the trade-off is easier comprehension of structure.
• Numbering. Could each graph be numbered?
• Links to add value, engage community. Could there be a link from the page to the spreadsheet from which the graphs are constructed? And I wonder whether there might be a talk page for each graph, perhaps on Meta? There's potential for community input about the data. Eventually, I guess there's scope for expanding the comments you've made beneath a few of the graphs, to explain interesting features

On another issue, could you confirm that columns F, I–K, and M–R on the main stats spreadsheets for the WPs have been permanently discontinued? We've exchanged several messages over the past two years, and I'm starting to think we won't see them again. It would be handy to know whether they should be dropped from my radar. Tony (talk) 13:13, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for response, Erik. Yes, same email. Tony (talk) 12:24, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Account on wikimediafoundation.org

Hi. I saw your note at Foundation wiki feedback. If you leave a request at WMFACCOUNT, I'd be happy to make you an account on wikimediafoundation.org. wikimediafoundation.org could use plenty of love. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 02:36, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikistats: views per speaker

Hi, Erik! First of of, thank you so much for building the Wikistats website, it's massive!

I wanted to suggest you a new statistic: views per speaker. It would be interesting to discuss how many pages does each person read in average, depending on their language. I did a quick table of the February 2013 results for some Wikipedia editions:

Language	Views per 1000 speakers per hour
Swedish	15,8
Finnish	15,0
Norwegian	14,0
Polish	13,7
Japanese	11,5
Dutch	10,9
Czech	10,1
Italian	10,7
English	7,8
German	7,5
French	5,5
Russian	5,4
Spanish	4,0
Turkish	3,0
Portuguese	2,5
Korean	1,2
Arabic	0,3
Chinese	0,3

Of course, Nordic languages are at the top. :) It would be cool to have such a fact everywhere. No, just kidding. But I'd love a quick number, I guess views per speaker per month, in the summaries. Can you do that? Thanks! --NaBUru38 (talk) 02:10, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Wow, you have already added that statistic per country here! Thanks again, you are the boss :) --NaBUru38 (talk) 03:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Erik, great job! Tony (talk) 04:45, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Queries for the Signpost

Hi Erik

I'm preparing the first of what may be an occasional series covering interesting aspects of the WMF report card.

On the Page views per country report, does "Portal" mean all WPs minus the WPs specified above? (If so, could I suggest that next time there be a note saying that "Portal = all other WPs"? I will need to explain this to Signpost readers.) Or does it mean the proportion of people who entered any WP via the portal instead of directly? The US, I see, has a very large Portal proportion of 8.2%. I'm a bit confused. Malaysia has 9.2%. All other countries seem to be 1–3%. I wonder why.

Does "Other" mean all other WMF sites minus the other categories given (e.g. Commons, Wikisource)?

Thanks. Tony (talk) 12:33, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Hi Tony1, portal means 'www.wikipedia.org'. If there is better term for this central landing page I'd be happy to hear. 8.2% of page views from US are to that portal. So this is not percentage of people in any form, just percentage of views to that page out of total pages viewed, from a certain country. I agree 8.2% views to portal page from US and even more from Malaysia is remarkable. It would be worth digging a little deeper, but unfortunately I can't do that right now. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:15, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

P.S. other is other Wikipedias only. Sister projects are not included. Erik Zachte (talk) 17:17, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Erik. I've dug up some surprising findings (that you probably already know about). Syria has a gigantic portal percentage that renders the en.WP and ar.WP proportions of views unusable, I think. I'll use that information about the "Other" category in the Signpost report. Tony (talk) 08:56, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Ping: I've emailed you the link; publication is happening now. Tony (talk) 12:49, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

EasyTimeline SVG?

Is it possible to make EasyTimeline produce an SVG image rather than a bitmap PNG? It seems to me like SVG would be preferable in almost all cases, if text and HTML/CSS isn’t an option. —Frungi (talk) 18:48, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

For every image there is always a png and svg version. If you copy the image url and replace png by svg you're done. Erik Zachte (talk) 21:43, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Stats.wikimedia

Wikivoyage logo at the front page of stats: is outdated. Could you please update it to File:Wikivoyage-logo.svg as soon as possible? Thanks Glaisher [talk] 10:20, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Done Erik Zachte (talk) 15:04, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks once again. --Glaisher [talk] 15:36, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decitions

The Wikimedia Foundation recently created a new feature, "superprotect" status. The purpose is to prevent pages from being edited by elected administrators -- but permitting WMF staff to edit them. It has been put to use in only one case: to protect the deployment of the Media Viewer software on German Wikipedia, in defiance of a clear decision of that community to disable the feature by default, unless users decide to enable it.

If you oppose these actions, please add your name to this letter. If you know non-Wikimedians who support our vision for the free sharing of knowledge, and would like to add their names to the list, please ask them to sign an identical version of the letter on change.org.

• Letter to Wikimedia Foundation: Superprotect and Media Viewer
• Letter on change.org

I'm notifying you because you participated in one of several relevant discussions. -Pete F (talk) 22:05, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Is there a way to do arithmetic inside <timeline>?

I was trying to (ab)use EasyTimeline to produce a bar chart, and I was really wishing there was some way to do simple arithmetic on the values, since popularity is frequently updated. My unsuccessful attempt to use {{#expr:}} can be seen in comments.

I'm just not sure of the order of expnasion of templates and things like <timeline>. The help doesn't make it clear, but does invite me to ask questions, so here I am. Thank you! 71.41.210.146 22:52, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for late response. I abandoned EasyTimeline support more than half a decade ago. Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 15:21, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Question about article stats

Hello, Erik,
There was a conversation going on on Jimmy Wales talk page about the article stats and the question arose over whether these stats included just articles created or was it (articles created - articles deleted)? Are there any stats about deleted articles or would those be difficult to acquire among all of the deleted pages that occur across Wikipedia? Thanks for any assistance you can offer. Liz (talk) 16:43, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Liz, sorry for late response. All of Wikistats is based on the database dumps, and all is regenerated every month for all historic months. Deleted articles/revisions are also deleted from the dumps, so for Wikistats deleted content never existed after every run. More on this in my recent response to Signpost article on the subject. Cheers, Erik

Discrepancies of article count on Jan-March '15

Hi Erik, I have a question (full detail in Talk:Article counts revisited), why are these four Wikipedias have different article counts on archive.org's January and March archives? For example Indonesian Wikipedias now is considered to have about 600k articles, where in actuality, the id:Special:Statistics still shows the number at around 350k. Coincidentally, these five Wikipedias are the only ones with alternative count table, which shows a closer number to the statistics.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20150109014525/http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm (9 Jan) Nov 14: ar 339 k, sv 1.9 M, id 351 k, jv 47 k, sw 27 k
• https://web.archive.org/web/20150318100548/http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm (18 March) Nov 14: ar 602 k, sv 3.1 M, 595 k, jv 59 k, sw 28 k

Thanks for your attention. ✒ Bennylin 14:07, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Bennylin. This obviously is a bug in Wikistats. Most redirects are no longer recognized as such (probably the ones with internationalized tag, e.g. Indonesian went from 255k to 12k redirects after Oct 2014). Only wikis for which full archive dump is used are affected (for Wikipedia these were id|jv|sv|sw|ar, as exceptions). However we are in the process of (hopefully) switching to stub dumps for all wikis, as the full dump process is getting exceedingly slow. More on this soon (on my blog). This switch will affect article counts for all historic months for those few Wikipedia as and all other wikis, as stub dumps don't allow for checking for internal link in raw article text. But this much smaller discrepancy with online counts has been there all along for most Wikipedias. Erik Zachte (talk) 11:45, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Template:Wikimedia Growth

Dear Erik,

may you update the numbers? Is it possible to migrate from <timeline> to <graph>?--Kopiersperre (talk) 18:04, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Did you ever attend Wikimania with your money? Talk to us!

TL;DR: Fill a short Wikimania survey, it takes 5 min.

Hi, I'm writing you because you are listed in Wikimania/Frequent attendees. As you probably know by now, Wikimania 2016 Esino Lario wants to achieve a Wikimania format which allows people to "get things done" and leave the conference fully satisfied with the result of their investment of time and other resources (see pillars 2 and 4: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2016_bids/Esino_Lario/Pillars ). For this purpose, we consider all audiences (see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2016_bids/Esino_Lario/Program#Target ).

Participants other than scholarship recipients and reimbursed representatives are one group we heard very little from, but we think they are important because: 1) they have financial resources and help make the Wikimania budget sustainable; 2) they have motivation to share and ideas on what makes Wikimania valuable.

We set up a form mainly to collect names of some such people and talk with them later: if you provide your contact, we may write you on this topic. We may release aggregate data from the resposes; data will be handled by us and the Wikimania 2016 fiscal sponsor "Ecomuseo delle Grigne" (under EU law). Please fill the whole form, it's short!

Feel free to forward this invite to anyone.

Thanks,
Federico Leva and Martin Rulsch
Wikimania 2016 team, scholarships subteam
08:30, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Problem with en:Classical music#Timeline of composers

Hello! There is a bizarre problem with the timeline on the classical music page on WP:en -- for a lo(oo)ng time, the Spanish composer Enrique Granados had his name misspelt as "Grandos" on the timeline (produced by EasyTimeline 1.90); unfortunately, correcting the spelling causes the timeline software to crash. I am fiddling around trying various workarounds -- but the most obvious one, simply reducing the volume of entries, does not work. Can you have a look please? How does one look at the source of the program, and is it written in Perl? Imaginatorium (talk) 08:15, 11 September 2016 (UTC)

Sorry I abandoned support for EasyTimeline about a decade ago. It's written in perl. There was an 'upgrade' to EasyTimeline (which I advised against) that broke many existing charts. However the chart spells correctly Granados, as you say it should. Updating the source with extra comment '# test', and rerendering causes not problems. Erik Zachte (talk) 11:48, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

2016 Community Wishlist Survey

Hi,

You’re getting this message because you participated in the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey and we want to make sure you don't miss it this year – or at least can make the conscious choice to ignore if it you want to. The 2015 survey decided what the Community Tech team should work on during 2016. It was also the focus of Wikimedia hackathons and work by other developers. You can see the status of wishes from the 2015 wishlist at 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Results.

The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey is now open for wishes. You can create proposals until November 20. You will be able to vote on which wishes you think are best or most important between November 28 and December 12. /Johan (WMF) (talk) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:17, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Hourly timeline

Despite being abandoned and written in Perl, EasyTimeline is deployed at Wikimedia wikis. I was trying to get it to display hourly data but the smallest unit is a day. Would you be interested in adding such feature? Or do you have experience using the Graphs extension timelines? I couldn't locate their documentation on the timelines format and the provided example in the demo looks too complicated. --Gryllida 10:43, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi, @Gryllida:. I totally abandoned EasyTimeline support almost a decade ago. Sorry, I'm not aware if anyone else still supports the extension. Erik Zachte (talk) 12:21, 6 May 2018 (UTC)