A wiki is like a living thing - it can be healthy, or not, in decline, or not; and like a living thing there is no one metric to test to determine "health". With a living body you do things like measure temperature, heartbeat, blood sugar levels (etc), and from those form a composite picture from which an opinion of "health" can be based.

On CommunityExpectation""s there is talk of another wiki being in the decline stage of the Wiki:CommunityLifeCycle. My question is what describes "decline", and what describes "health" - that is, what are the physiological signs a good WikiDoctor could monitor (cf heartbeat, temperature, blood sugar levels, etc)

'''What are the various vital signs of a wiki?'''

There are a number of parameters that could be monitored:
* page count
* average page hits per day
* average page hits per day (not counting owners/admins)
* average page creations per day (vis a vis total pages)
* edit/read ratio
* average page creations per day (not counting owners/admins)
* average contributors per day
* homepage count
* homepage creations per month
* new contributors per month
* wanted pages count vs existing pages count (plus variations like average vs mean)
* ratio of new homepages on recent changes compared to real pages
* interconnectednesss of pages vs # of isolated islands
* number of pages with no backlinks
* ...

But I don't know whether anyone has ever monitored these systematically. I intend to do it sometime in the future for the wikis I set up. -- HelmutLeitner

''ratio of new homepages on recent changes compared to real pages'' -- I've noticed on the WikiWiki a preponderance of new home pages recently [May 2001]. Of 300+ entries on recent changes, there are about 50 home pages, and nearly half of those are new home pages. There is a total of 97 "new" pages, of which 22 are new home pages. This is of course only a snapshot in time, and is statistically meaningless. It may mean something, or it may not.

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Wiki:WikiReaderToWriterRatio now has a [http://c2.com/cgi/wikiReadWrite script link] to compute some stats from.


As of the last three hours (14:44-17:47 on Friday, Oct 25, 2002), it look like WikiWikiWeb is serving about one page per 3 second, and one page edit is submitted every 4.5 minutes. It looks like traffic right now is about 1/3 the "typical" amount for more busy times.