User:Whiteknight/Count Ticker/About

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Whiteknight	Discussion	Book Foundry	All Books	New Book Guide	Book Creator	Images	About Me

Due to a severe shortage of time, I am no longer able to be an active member of the Wikibooks project. Please see my page for more details about my absense. I will continue to monitor my talk page for correspondence and will try to reply quickly when possible.

Counter Ticker

The counter ticker is used to reduce load on the toolserver. By hosting the data here, especially in a form that is more conducive to book-like organization, it will reduce the need for people to load the data from the toolserver.

About the Results

The Wikicharts hit count results are sampled to 1% of all hits. This is to prevent an overload of the server. The reported hit count, therefore, will be computed by taking the number of sampled hits and multiplying by 100. Notice that there is a bug in the way the results are computed. The total number of hits since the edit counter was first started in November 2007 is divided by the current day of the month. I am currently working on ways to account for this bug in my aggregator, and a bug report has been filed with Wikicharts.

All results are aggregated per-book, not per-page. This means that the page counts on the wikicharts page list are added to the book count in a running tally. Book pages which do not appear on the Wikicharts list cannot be included in these totals. Because of the way page hits are sampled, it is hoped that the errors in this procedure will average out over time.

Starting in January 2008, on the last day of the month all the raw counts are replaced with subtracted per-day counts. In this way, the archives always show accurate data (and I dont need to change my algorithm to try and find the daily counts immediately).

Thresholding

Only books that have higher then average hits will be displayed in the list. Since the page hit list can be approximated by a w:Poisson Distribution, the majority of all books will be below this average. The threshold value is the computed hit average. Only books above this threshold will be displayed. The number of books with hits above this threshold will be displayed as Books listed. At the moment, i've implemented a hard cap at 50 books to be listed (more then that are truncated, regardless of the threshold).

The total hit count is a sum of the top 500 per-page hit counts, and is not a sum of the posted per-book counts.

Report Format

The Script that updates the ticker is under active development, and the format of the page count results will be subject to change over time. Let me know on the scripts page about any features that I should add.

The reports are formatted using User:Whiteknight/HitsTotal, User:Whiteknight/Hits and User:Whiteknight/Hits2 templates. These templates will change over time.

Known Issues

no known issues at this time.

Google Analytics

With the hit counter active, the google analytics test is no longer necessary for this purpose. Google page hit results will no longer be used with Wikibooks, but I will still maintain the account for future uses. I have disabled the google.js script, and any user who has installed it into their profiles can safely remove it.