Research:Daily pages created

Standard metric

Daily pages created

Specification

${\text{daily pages created}}(D)$ is a count of the number of page creations across all namespaces on date $D$.

WMF Standard

no parameters

Measures

Contribution

Status

completed

SQL

SET @date = "20140101";

SELECT
    COUNT(*) AS page_creations
FROM (
    SELECT
        rev_user,
        rev_user_text
    FROM
        revision
    WHERE
        rev_timestamp BETWEEN @date AND
            DATE_FORMAT(DATE_ADD(@date, INTERVAL 1 DAY), "%Y%m%d%H%i%S") AND
        rev_parent_id = 0
    UNION ALL
    SELECT
        ar_user as rev_user,
        ar_user_text AS rev_user_text
    FROM
        archive
    WHERE
        ar_timestamp BETWEEN @date AND
            DATE_FORMAT(DATE_ADD(@date, INTERVAL 1 DAY), "%Y%m%d%H%i%S") AND
        ar_parent_id = 0
) page_creations;

Daily pages created is a standardized metric used to measure the number of pages that are created in a given day. It's used as a proxy for overall Contribution.

Discussion

Identifying page creations

Regretfully, MediaWiki does not track a history of page creation events. However, by using the rev_parent_id field, this metric makes a close approximation. rev_parent_id usually points to the previous revision. For the first revision of a page, rev_parent_id = 0. This metric approximates page creations by looking for these parentless revisions.

Time lag

As this is a daily metric, a full 24 hours must elapse after the beginning of the date (UTC) in order to calculate an uncensored value.

Analysis