[wiki-research] WikiTracer: open call for alpha testers

[Dario Taraborelli]

We have been working over the last months on a new Web service called  
WikiTracer [1], first presented at WikiSym 08 and designed to provide  
visual analytics and comparative statistics for wiki-based communities.

We think this service may be of interest to a broad range of users,  
i.e.:

	• wiki owners, who will be able to understand more about their wiki  
by monitoring its growth and potential problems
	• wiki developers, who will be able to assess the adoption of their  
product and the popularity of specific versions
	• wiki practitioners, who will be able to obtain valuable insights on  
the performance of a wiki and build best practices to spur wiki  
adoption against quantitative analyses
	• wiki researchers, who will be able to use the data produced by this  
service to perform large-scale studies on the evolution of wiki-based  
comunities
The project is in alpha stage and WT plugins are currently available  
for WikkaWiki and DokuWiki, while support for other engines is still  
under development. We are looking for wikis with a fairly large user  
population and significant daily activity to join as alpha testers: by  
joining the WT tester community, your wiki will be polled on a daily  
basis allowing WikiTracer to collect a number of statistics on its  
content and population. No privacy-sensitive information is extracted,  
the list of indicators used by WikiTracer can be found on the WT data  
format specification page [2].

We are planning to run the test phase until early April 2009 to be  
able to collect sufficient data to implement the visualization tools.
If you are interested in joining (or helping develop plugins for other  
engines), please drop us a line at: info [at] wikitracer [dot] com. To  
learn more about WikiTracer, you can visit its documentation wiki [3],  
the (low traffic) WT community mailing list [4] or pop by on the WT  
IRC channel on freenode [5].

We hope to see you on board!

Dario Taraborelli



[1] http://wikitracer.com/

[2] http://wikitracer.com/docs/WTPluginDraft

[3] http://wikitracer.com/docs

[4] http://dev.wikitracer.com/mailman/listinfo/community_dev.wikitracer.com

[5] irc://irc.freenode.net/wikitracer



--
Dario Taraborelli
Research Fellow

Centre for Research in Social Simulation
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford GU2 7XH
United Kingdom

+44 (0)1483 683961
http://nitens.org/taraborelli