Programming, Software and Code

POE Edit counter

29 Jan 2008
legacy
I threw together a quick edit counter for Wikibooks and Wikiversity today, using Perl/POE/Tk. It was actually surprisingly easy, once I figured out what I needed to do. Of some note is the fact that much of the documentation on poe.perl.org is terribly inaccurate, and it took me some time to find a working example for me to emulate. Of course, I shouldn't complain since i'm not going to offer to update it myself.

I primarily wanted to count the relative edit frequency of Wikibooks and wikiversity. I had a suspicion, based only on a visual inspection of the RC feeds, that Wikibooks was attracting approximately three times as many edits as Wikiversity. I ran the feed for a few minutes, and sure enough, my prediction seemed to be about true:
I only ran this for a brief period of time, certainly not enough to "prove" anything about the numerical relationship on average. These counts are for all RC entries, including log entries, page moves, edits, rollbacks, etc. Anything that appears in the IRC channel gets counted. It would be trivial to perform some kind of filtering on these results, and I may do that eventually.

My curiosity quickly got the better of me, and I extended the code to count Wikipedia edits as well. After a few minutes of writing (just enough really to type this blog post), here are the counts:
Going by these numbers, it appears that en.Wikipedia is about 200 times more active then WB, and about 800 times larger then WV. Of course, this is just a very short sample, I intend to run the counter for a long while to try and get a better picture of average edit counts.

I like this combination of Perl/POE/Tk, and I can already think of a few things I would like to do with it (assuming I can find accurate documentation I need to make it happen).

This entry was originally posted on Blogger and was automatically converted. There may be some broken links and other errors due to the conversion. Please let me know about any serious problems.