Essay:WikiFactor

The wikiFactor (wF) is a measure of the "importance of a wikisite", as the inventor of this measure, Carl McBride, put it in his paper on the topic.

Definition of the wikiFactor wF
In his paper, Carl McBride introduces the wF as follows:

The wikiFactor of a wiki is the unique number wF such that there are wF pages on the wiki with at least 1000 * wF views.

This is easy enough to calculate, even manually if you have a list of the pages sorted by the number of views. Then, you only have to look at the n-th page in the list with less then n * 1000 views. Then, wF = n-1.

The more important the wiki, the easier the calculation. Take for instance aStorehouseOfKnowledge. A look at Special:Statistics shows on Mar 16, 2010:

Factorous pages
Factorous pages are a Wiki's top pages whose rank number in the mw:Extension:HitCounters leaderboard is lesser or equal than the wikiFactor number.

In the example above, the top four pages qualify as such.

What the Heck?
Why do we need it? It's really not that hard to measure the impact of a wiki: clearly Wikipedia is more important than Conservapedia, as Wikipedia trumps CP in every category other than blocked IPs.

But what about Citizendium and Conservapedia? What is the best benchmark to compare those two? The number of active editors? The number of articles? The mean number of views per article? The statistics page of each wiki gives us an abundance of information, just try to compare these two.

The wikiFactor is another one, and it could just work.

WikiFactor of wikipedia.en
For en.wikipedia, the wikifactor is difficult to calculate: wp:Special:PopularPages doesn't exist, in fact, the view counter (which usually can be found at the bottom of each page) is turned off. Fortunately, there are sites which allow the curious to look at the number of views for a page - or the top 1000 pages - albeit on a monthly basis.

Using this information for Dec 2009, one finds that wFwp is at least 300. And just estimating that the overall page views of the most popular several thousand pages are at least fifty times the page views of a single month, leads to a wFwp of more than 4,000.

That is indeed enormous!

Critique
Why ask for wF * 1000 views? If possible, one should give wFh, too, with:

The h-wikiFactor of a wiki is the biggest number wFh such that there are wFh pages on the wiki with at least wFh views.

For the calculation of wFh, one needs to look at more pages, so it is not that easy. But it seems to be more elegant.