Topic on Talk:Wikistats 2.0 Design Project/RequestforFeedback/Round1/Site architecture

Since I'm the data analyst on the Editing team, I'm generally responsible for movement-level metrics related to editorship. I have a lot of ideas for how to improve or expand these metrics (such as a session-time-based active editors count and a robust breakdown of edits by tool used to make them), which I hope to have time to develop at some vague point in the future :)

Will the Wikistats 2.0 structure be elastic enough to accept these kind of modifications if, after all due consultation, they are ready to be adopted?

Definitely yes, but it would be nice to riff a bit on how that would look.

One thought is that new metrics should be carefully placed in the way we envision this structure with like top level categories and question-driven navigation. So like, if your metric answers a question better, it can be bubbled up as a metric/view in that screen. But if it answers a new question, vet that more and see who cares about the question.

Another is to have a staging area for new metrics and have them organically evolve into the Wikistats structure. We could allow everyone to edit the wikistats navigation structure on-wiki and manage it like we manage anything else. This was kind of the idea behind Dashiki in the first place.

Thoughts?

I don't have a strong opinion about how exactly the change process should look, other than feeling there should be some stage for user consultation if the change is significant. Now that I know we can change the lineup, I think we can safely leave the question of process until I have (or someone else has) a specific change in mind.

I'm not really wild about editing the navigation on-wiki; in my experience with Dashiki, it adds complexity (as one more place you have to go to configure the board, in addition to the code repo itself) without much benefit (because you can't really understand or use the wiki page without understanding the code repo too). It's a good idea in theory, but in practice I don't think there's enough interest to justify it.

Well, so far dashiki configs have been cryptic and undocumented. I think we should give it a chance once the Dashiki extension deploys and it's formatted a little nicer plus has a nicer editor. If that plus some good documentation doesn't help, then I'll agree with you and give up this notion. I do think it has merit where people from different communities on different wikis might want different default views for their projects on wikistats. Having control over that seems interesting.

Good on the user consultation, agreed. I mean the main point of this whole project is to be a useful tool with minimal noise. Whatever we have to do to make that happen, we'll do it.