Is there a particular reason why this would limit users to comparing 3 wikis at a time? 3 seems exceedingly low; if there has to be a limit, I feel like 10 would do a better job at accommodating the majority of uses.
Topic on Talk:Wikistats 2.0 Design Project/RequestforFeedback/Round1/Component wiki selector
Mostly screen real-estate to keep things clear and simple so they don't start scrolling all over the place and make the tool feel too "BI". People have been asking for more advanced comparisons like tables and all-wiki comparisons. So we're definitely planning to meet that use case, but it doesn't seem like a primary one from what people mentioned on the Future_per_report survey and as part of this consultation. If we're wrong, we'll make it more prominent, but do you think this simpler interface doesn't meet the majority of use cases?
I've never used a BI system, so I don't know about their interface shortcomings, but that's not something I'd worry about if your primary audience is editors. Usually the WMF gets flak for new interfaces because editors feel like they have too much whitespace and are too information-light, rather than the reverse :) Anyway, the existing Dashiki layouts allow you to display a lot more than 3 wikis at once, and I've never found that unclear.
And I'm not sure the Future per Report survey is a great place to look for guidance here. It asked people to vote narrowly on which reports they wanted to keep, not to reflect more broadly on which interfaces and capabilities they found most useful. And at any rate the greatest number of keep votes in that survey was for the "site map per project" which is all about cross-project comparisons (of course, it was at the very top so that may have played a role too :)
I'm sure a limit of 3 wikis would suffice for >50% of use cases, but I think there's a very substantial minority where it wouldn't. For example, one extremely common one is comparing how big different wikis are and how their sizes have fluctuated over time. "Hmm...what are the big wikis?...English Wikipedia, okay...Commons, yeah...German Wikipedia...French Wikipedia...oh, wait, I can't add that one?" Like I said, I think 10 would be sufficient to support these kind of use cases.
Well, like Pivot is a simple BI system. Probably one of the more polished I've ever seen. Tableau would be another.
Good point about the survey, I think the second round of consultation where we make a working prototype and people can click around the site hopefully brings more opinions. And hey, if people hate the whitespace I'll chop it right off. Right off! :)
Cool, I'll brainstorm what that would look like in the design, which we're starting to work with now. It's definitely possible to include and just collapse if it's not being used, satisfying all parties here (imagined and real).