Use the following template for a nicely presented post:
{{Forum post|Write your message here!|~~~~}}
However, tucked away in the middle is also a list of Popular Pages. Which is great. It's replaced the old Most Visited page, and now gives a much, much longer list of articles together with weekly and monthly page views (updated Mondays). Because it's averaged over the week, it's much more stable. For the first time, we can quantify how many visits individual pages receive, and through them gauge the activity and interests of our readers.
First, statistics. I've been tracking a few of the most popular pages for several weeks to draw some statistics, calculating daily page views averaged over each week (that is, taking the weekly value and dividing by seven).
- Main Page: 810–1568 views per day, avg. 1210 views per day
- Drizzt Do'Urden: 166–299 views per day, avg. 245 views per day
- Faerûn: 158–291 views per day, avg. 237 views per day
- Drow: 127–272 views per day, avg. 194 views per day
- Waterdeep: 99–191 views per day, avg. 145 views per day
The numbers vary from week to week, but remain fairly consistent across the watched pages, suggesting a wiki-wide fluctuation. We had quite a dip in one week, but for the last two weeks, we've had some quite high values. I doubt we can lose or gain a few hundred readers each week. I don't know what this weekly variation means, maybe some seasonal variation in the habits of D&D players and FR fans? :) I mean to continue tracking it over the year.
I'm very pleased to see that the Main Page dominates the list of Popular Pages every week, and by such a large number, at an average of 4.9 times that of the next most popular page, Drizzt Do'Urden. These are people who either have the wiki bookmarked and are visiting it for research or curiosity, or who have come to another page via a link or Google search and gotten interested enough to visit the Main Page and then explore the rest of the wiki. Of course, these figures will track some repeat views, but these shouldn't deflate the values much. Actually, every wiki seems to have its main page on the top, so there's not much we can draw from this.
On the other hand, Quick Stats on the Special:AdminDashboard (admins only, sorry) shows the total wiki views. Last week, the wiki received an average of 59,000 views per day. I doubt that's 59,000 people, more 59,000 pages viewed. That's a far cry from the Main Page's 1568 views per day last week, so it looks like by far the largest number of people (if it doesn't include web-crawlers or bots or whatever) are finding the wiki through Google searches, and not bookmarking at the Main Page.
Core topics of the setting, meanwhile, receive a few dozen to up to 300 views a day. Of the thousand pages listed today, 995 have received some attention from someone in the last week. So, assuming this is a representative example week, ~5% of the wiki is being read each week (though these include categories and such, which the total page count for the wiki doesn't include). However, an almost identical number, 997 pages, or ~5% again, received attention in the last month. The counts don't even intersect until the last page or less. So, although this selection varies from week to week, it doesn't vary by much. I guess our readers aren't following a lot of the minor or obscure stuff but instead are keeping to the more central topics of the setting. Actually, Wookieepedia has the same proportions, and is a vastly more widely read wiki, so this doesn't seem to be something to worry about.
Similarly, while it's hard to see every page in the list at once, I'm not sure there's much feed-through from the Main Page to the Featured Articles, Current Clack links, or Realmslore pages. That is, they're not getting hundreds or even dozens of views each day, so probably only a handful of readers are checking them, if that.
The lists of Popular Pages show all the usual suspects in the top hundred and a bit. Divided by type, in no particular order, from the last week, these are:
- Main characters: Drizzt Do'Urden, Artemis Entreri, Elminster Aumar, Catti-brie, Jarlaxle Baenre
- Key races: aasimar and tiefling, dragonborn, drow, genasi, elves (elf, high elf, moon elf, wood elf, sun elf, half-elf), dwarf and duergar, goliath, human, and orc;
- Aberrant monsters: mind flayer, aboleth, beholder
- Other monsters and types: fey, dragon, metallic dragon, gold dragon, lich, verbeeg for some reason
- Deities: Lolth, Shar, Bahamut, Lathander, Torm, Tyr, Selûne, Eilistraee, Mystra, Kelemvor, Bane, Cyric, Ilmater, Tempus, Helm, Bhaal, Mielikki, Mask, Tiamat, Corellon, Moradin, Tymora, Talos, Silvanus, Sune, Ao, Oghma, Chauntea, Auril, Mystra (Midnight), Gruumsh, Seldarine, Malar, Myrkul, as well as deity, greater deity, primordial,
- Archdevils, demon princes, and similar: Asmodeus, Demogorgon, demon lord, archdevil, archfey
- Big events: Spellplague, Sundering (event), Time of Troubles
- Places: Faerûn and its map, Waterdeep, Neverwinter, Underdark, Cormyr, Netheril, Sword Coast, Thay, Toril, Baldur's Gate, Menzoberranzan
- Planes: Nine Hells, Feywild
- Lists: List of dragons, Portal:Deities, Portal:Geography, List of novels in order of publication, Portal:History,
- Others: Warlock, Forgotten Realms, Draconic language, Harpers, Zhentarim
I imagined a lot of these would be general monsters and core races, picked up through Google or other searches, as the wiki usually lies at the top of search results, but it seems actually very Realms-focused. So it seems readers are most interested in the main novel characters, the core playable races, the major deities (including archdevils and demon princes), dragons, aberrant monsters, and the main areas and organizations in the Realms, as well as the major disasters. Which is actually complete unsurprising. :) Ironically, for all the complaining I remember of fans being sick of the divine soap opera, aberrations, and realms-shaking events, these seem to draw quite a bit of interest. Anyway, in addition to the Main Page, these articles are very much our face to the public and reader base.
Unfortunately, very few of these articles are Good or Featured Articles (Ilmater, Eilistraee, Mystra, goliath), and not many have been cleaned or rehabilitated. Furthermore, they don't lie within the projects or fields of interest of our current major editors and contributors. Sadly, our pet projects aren't really helping to develop these, we all wander elsewhere, and our good work isn't being read to a significant degree.
So, my conclusions:
The Main Page is a key part of the wiki. Although we don't get significant numbers of readers going on to Featured Articles and others we showcase on the Main Page, we can't neglect them either. I still feel the activity on the Main Page shows the wiki to be dynamic, active, and with a good community.
We should focus more attention on rehabilitating and improving the most popular articles. These are just as much our public face, and help draw casual readers and searchers into the wiki. A good article among these gets one interested in reading more. So, if you're looking for a project or something to clean up, I strongly recommend looking through the Popular Pages list. Unfortunately, these are also the hardest projects one could choose as well, being the most detailed and active topics.
I actually have wanted to fix up genasi for some time, but so much of what is currently here is 4e info. 4e, as with so many other things, completely changed the genasi. And of course, 5e seems to have changed them right back, so now we have to have some weird way of explaining the severe changes in that race, even though the sourcebooks haven't specifically given us those details. This makes it hard to make an article of good quality, because either there is missing information or the setting was so wrecked by 4e as to make reconciliation impossible. Anyhow, I could help with a horde project (even if I wasn't interested in the topic), but I'd prefer to have a role fitting projects I already have. For example, I could make Drizzt's or Elminster's family tree or outline the line of succession of Cormyr.
I argued at the Horde Editing project proposal that any selected topic should be valid across all editions.
I've been wanting to tackle a race myself, like tiefling or duergar. I think a lot of the 4e races should be split off into separate pages: 4e dragonborn are very different to the 3e dragonborn, and the same goes for aasimar, tieflings, genasi, eladrin, and others. The difference or lack might be noticeable, but that's what 4e did. The wiki gains in clarity regardless, and I think even a 1e/2e/3e/_/5e article would be a decent Featured Article.
I think we're all used to our projects branching out, and us needing to do articles peripheral to our projects for completeness. I only intended to do Wheloon for my campaign, then I felt like extending that through the rest of Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave; I did Thunderstone for another campaign; Alusair Obarskyr because I wanted to see a heroine FA; and so now I'm think of developing more of south-eastern Cormyr.
Anyway, I don't want to stop or change our current projects, more to give some ideas and see if we can target them better, to make the wiki more useful and impressive to the fandom. Horde editing should hopefully minimise the extra work.
At the least, the Popular Pages are the ones to rehabilitate first, even if we don't develop them. More people see a substandard article than a featured one, sadly.
