Page Counts

It's been an interesting year in terms of page hit counting, to say the least. Wikibooks is being analyzed by the wikicharts page counter, and aggregated results are being kept on Wikibooks. These results are compiled per-book, and only the top 5o books are listed. Statistics have been running for about 3 months now, although only pages in the main namespace and the Wikijunior namespace are being kept. This means that hits to the [[Cookbook]] (which now has it's own namespace) are not being kept, nor are discussions in the talk or Wikibooks namespaces. Some people have suggested expanding the page counter to include these other spaces, but I dont know if there is enough interest to warrant it.

Here are some general pieces of information that we have gathered in 3 months of statistics keeping. Keep in mind that all these results are computed statistically, and are subject to my interpretation:

1. en.wikibooks seems to get about 90K-110K page hits per month. This is only for the top 500 pages. This comes down to about 3000 hits per day. I think this is a reasonable, if low, estimate of readership
   
2. Our three best books, consistently, are [[Blender 3D: Noob to Pro]], [[LaTeX]], and [[Human Physiology]]. Combined, these three books seem to get about 30K-35K hits per month. That's about 100 hits per day.
   
3. The Main Page gets about 10K-15K hits per month (350 hits per day)
   
4. Wikijunior, including the Wikijunior main page and all Wikijunior books, only seem to get about 1500 hits per month or less. Wikijunior books are rarely in the top 50 most popular books, despite our advertising efforts.
   
5. For some reason, [[How to solve the Rubik's Cube]] is the 4th most popular book, for the last three months. It gets about 1 page hit per day or more. This single-page "book" is relatively lousy as far as books go, and it is edited relatively infrequently. [[How to use a Motorola DVR]] also gets an unbelievably high page hit count. Combined, these books get about 4000 hits per month.

These results are very interesting, to say the least, and it's helping us on Wikibooks to focus our attention on pages that people are reading the most. These results are limited, however. Some people have suggested installing Google Analytics as an opt-in gadget with our fancy new gadgets extension, although support for that has been luke-warm at best. We've also been promised that Wikicharts is going to be improved in the future, so that's something to look forward to.