FAQ.txt

CollabStats Documentation
FAQ

# Q) Wikistats should merge wiki usernames to irc usernames automatically,
  and it should be smarter about what names should get merged - e.g., wiki
  user "Finklestein" should merge to irc user "finklestein".
  A) No, it shouldn't.  Wikistats doesn't attempt any user name merging -
  by design.  I felt that the two domains (Wikis and IRC) were so distinct 
  (for social reasons and technical ones) that you couldn't reasonably 
  count on users with similar names between them to be the same individual.  
  I thought that inappropriate username merging would be worse than none 
  at all, so for joining the wiki and IRC domains, my mental model has you 
  using 'user_merges -w' and confirming each choice.

# Q) In Wikistats, using the Editor Report, what does the "Pages Created" 
  column actually measure?
  A) For a given registered username, it measures the number of pages for 
  which the lowest-numbered revision was created by this username.  It
  includes counts of every page type, including User and Talk pages.

# Q) In Wikistats, some reports mention Changes and some reports mention 
  Edits.  What is the difference between a Change and an Edit?
  A) An Edit is a collection of Changes to a particular page - recorded in
  the wiki dumps as a distinct revision.  A Change in one or more bytes which
  are different between the last revision and the current one.  It could be 
  an insertion, a deletion, or a replacement (note that replacements need not 
  be the same length as the text they replace).

# Q) In Wikistats, the Editor's Change Count and Change Size scores are 
  presented as a number.  What do they mean?
  A) The Change Size number represents the number of modifications necessary 
  to get from one page revision to another.  The counting is +1 per letter 
  inserted, +1 per letter deleted, and +1 for each character in a 
  substitution.  So for a particular editor, the Average Change Count tells you
  about how many places they make changes to a particular page, nad the Average
  Change Size tells you about how big those changes tend to be.  

  For example, someone with a high Average Change Count and a low Average 
  Change Size is probably making a lot of minor edits, like spelling or 
  punctuation changes.  If the inverse is true, then they're probably 
  authoring a lot of original content.

# Q) In Wikistats, how are months computed?
  A) Months as represented are standard calendar months.  If a date range is
  not indicated for some stat, then the stat output represents counts since
  "the beginning of time" - the first revision of the first page at the 
  creation of the wiki, up until the moment that the stats dump was created.

# Q) In Wikistats, what pages are being referred to as "content pages"?
  A) Every page which fails to match a search for "User:*" and "* talk:".