Essay talk:WikiFactor

What is Wikipedia's wikiFactor? - π 21:21, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I honestly don't know. But it's safe to guess that en.wikipedia.org's wF is the upper bound of all existing wFs. I didn't find it at wikiindex, but I'll try to think of a way to estimate it. larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 21:37, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I made a rough estimate: it should be over 4,000 (see wikiFactor article). The number of 50 is just a schlafly statistic: many pages are only popular for a certain amount of time (wp:Taylor Lautner), so the slope for an overall estimate should be less steep. OTOH, the all-time populars like wp:wikipedia, wp:main, will have attracted much more than fifty times the views over the last nine years!

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 09:16, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Two comments

Dear LArron, I should like to make two comments:

1) You say "Obviously, this definition doesn't work...". Could you explain why?

2) You also say "...his eponymous paper"; I would not go as far as to say eponymous, after all, it is not called the McBrideFactor. Actually, at the time I would have liked to have called it the wiki-index, in line with the h-index, but there is a web site known as wikiIndex (where I occasionally lend a hand as an administrator) so I settled for wikiFactor.

All the best, --Carl McBride (talk) 10:48, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment! I'm awfully sorry: the definition does work - I don't remember what I was thinking when I wrote otherwise! How often was a patently wrong statement introduced with obviously.... My apologies!

And eponymous is misleading, too - though I think of the wF as the McBride-coefficient :-)

It seems to work quite nicely - the wF_Citizendium is surprisingly small

So, thanks again, I change the text

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 18:32, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks for the changes LArron. Actually, from what I have seen, a wF of 25 is pretty respectable when one looks at other wikis (it is probably better to treat wikipedia as an outlier with regards to almost any metric!). --Carl McBride (talk) 10:37, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

• Just a question: Are you generally looking only at pages in namespace main? My little graph includes the other namespaces, too. The difference isn't big, I think.
• RationalWiki is doing alright - thought there is ample room for improvement :-)
• I was surprised by citizendium, who should really be disturbed by their wF_citizendium - they wanted to become the new wikipedia in the foreseeable future...
• do you have some data on the distribution of wikiFactors? It's getting fascinating :-)

larron^{sicut fur in nocte} 15:00, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

• Are you generally looking only at pages in namespace main?:

Yes, for two reasons: the first is that the main namespace is, as its name suggests, the principal component of a wiki. The second reason is more pragmatic; the Special:PopularPages page provided by MediaWiki, used to glean the wikiFactor, only lists main pages. However, as you mentioned, I suspect a survey of all the pages in all the namespaces would result in virtually the same wF.

• data on the distribution of wikiFactors?

the best source I know of to date is the Category:WikiFactor page (and related sub-pages) on WikiIndex.

All the best, Carl McBride (talk) 13:40, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

That listing seems to be incomplete. Anyway, I just looked up a few, which may be of interest:

• Conservapedia 162
• RationalWiki 34
• Wikinfo 25
• Citizendium 21

Can any useful conclusions be drawn from this sort of result? Peter Jackson 17:31, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Above figures were from WikiIndex. I've now checked them. Yours is now 36, but the others are correct. Peter Jackson 10:00, 2 September 2011 (UTC)