Forum:Wiki Stats 2020

Well met, stats fans! While it's been years since I've done this and, as we'll see, it would be better to wait another several months for a complete picture, I've realised that Quantcast has started removing its earliest data, providing us with only a year's worth. So, it's better to get it done sooner before more is lost, while I've got a chance and can't procrastinate further. Maybe a more thorough statistical analysis could be done, but I'm 19 years after failing my stats course and this is time-consuming enough as it is. But I know, statistics is how we sort truth from spin.

Anyway, let's see how the wiki has been doing...

WAM
In short, pretty well. On 19 July 2020, on FANDOM's Wiki Activity Monitor, the Forgotten Realms Wiki has a WAM Score of 98.12/100 and was ranked 58 out of the 5000 top wikis on FANDOM, and 28th out of the 2031 top wikis on the Gaming vertical. That's mostly video games (right now, we sit between the Assassin's Creed and Xenoblade wikis) and can be odd company (the advertising we get tends to be computer games and hardware). This of course reflects the current popularity and profile of D&D. But how do we compare to other D&D wikis?

Googling 'forgotten realms wiki' gives the FRW as first hit, above Wikipedia, and no real competition as wiki for the Forgotten Realms. Googling 'dungeons dragons wiki' gives a few: Wikipedia, us, Dungeons and Dragons Wiki, and a few on other sites that seem to be largely homebrew and a 1d4chan. I'd say the FRW is best, but I am biased. I don't have stats for the others, so I'll look at the (English-language) competition on FANDOM in the Gaming vertical: Dungeons and Dragons Wiki is 1488 and scores 27.03, while D&D Lore Wiki is 941 and scores 51.31 and Dungeons & Dungeons 4e Wiki is 1280 and scores 36.20, and they also get a fraction of our traffic on Quantcast. So, I feel confident saying the FRW is indeed the top-ranked and most-popular D&D-related wiki around.

I've been recording the WAM data randomly, but it fluctuates daily and weekly averages aren't provided, making the graphs are ugly and confusing, so I'll keep them to myself. I probably need to record every Tuesday or something. But we hit our current peak rank of 15 on 3 March 2020, with a maximum WAM Score of 98.72, rising to a new maximum of 98.84 the next day. That was achieved in the wake of the big Baldur's Gate 3 gameplay reveal. Otherwise, our position within WAM has remained at consistent high all year.

The WAM Score is "a combination of traffic, engagement and growth", but exactly how it's calculated and what it really represents is a secret known only to FANDOM. Nevertheless, traffic is what we get naturally and growth is what we do anyway, so the only remaining factor to enhance is engagement. This is likely to be heavily based on discussion, that is, use of User Talk, Talk, and Forum pages, as well as Blogs, Article Comments and Message Walls. Even wikis for less well-known (at least AFAIK) franchises that are smaller and get less traffic can get crazy high WAM scores and rankings probably because they have high levels of communications. For example, the Adopt Me Roblox wiki (the kids play Roblox and I don't even know what it is) only has 705 pages and a quarter of our unique visitors per month, yet currently has a WAM score of 99.65 and is ranked 6 overall. But its Recent Changes is nothing but chat, trolling, vandals, blocks, and shitposts, so this form of "engagement" is not really desirable. Other wikis seem similarly placed with high levels of discussion, good and bad. Whatever its form, FANDOM seems to be chasing interaction.

So, to boost WAM higher, we probably need more activity on User Talk, Talk, and Forum pages (not just in our Slack group). We could also think about using Blogs more, using Polls, and activating Chat, Article Comments, and Message Walls. Yet this is a reverse missile: it means more trolling, vandals, and need for moderation. Of course, we don't need a higher WAM ranking, WAM ranks are no measure of quality, it nets us nothing and being 50, 15, or 5 is arbitrary when we're already top D&D wiki. However, as we've seen on Twitter and other forums, fans don't think to or don't seem to know how to talk to us and will go elsewhere and ask other people, so having more avenues of discussion could attract more editors.

Popular Pages
Next, I'll look at Special:Insights/popularpages. The values are updated weekly, and starting in May 2016 I recorded them for the Main Page and a few selected top pages each week (though I missed a few weeks) and added some more as they became interesting. The dates are my Mondays and cover the preceding week, right before they update. I divided by 7 to produce a daily average. I can't explain all the dips, and suspect some data-points are erroneous, but there are some interesting peaks and troughs.

First, the obvious spikes. Simply, Stranger Things Season 2 came out on 27 October 2017 and Season 3 on 4 July 2019. With its D&D references, people searched for Demogorgon, mind flayer, and Vale of Shadows, and found the FRW, prompting huge increases in page views in the week after. This also happened for Season 1 on 15 July 2016, but I didn't know about the series and wasn't recording the relevant pages then. I know Vale of Shadows was the most popular page at the time, so I thought it was in error. So was the series – Plane of Shadow would've been more accurate. Anyway, I imagine we educated them on the D&D lore behind the series. Some of these visitors seem to have checked out the rest of the site, judging by the small bumps to the Main Page.

The rest of the time, Demogorgon is about as popular as Drizzt. Curiously, not even Drizzt novel releases cause a blip in his page views. Maybe Drizzt fans don't need the refreshers, or already know our Drizzt Do'Urden page isn't nearly complete.

There are more mind flayer spikes, corresponding to Baldur's Gate 3 news: the first trailer on 6 June 2019 produced a bigger bump to mind flayer than even Stranger Things, and the gameplay reveal on 28 February 2020 produced another. I started recording Baldur's Gate, but much too late and it's still obscured by Drizzt and Demogorgon.

You'll notice some fluctuations over time and a general rise. Partly, I assume this is due to the increased popularity of D&D driving visitors and our own higher profile and quality retaining more readers. Some notable dips in the middle of Decembers are of course Christmas and more generally the holiday periods. I suspect there are longer-period seasonal variations (e.g., US summer holidays), but they seem obscured by more local activity and overall growths, which I'll look at in more detail later.

There's also a clear divergence in the popularity of the topics I picked initially. I presume interest in general D&D and FR topics has grown, while interest in Drizzt novels has not. Of course, WotC has focused recent adventures on Waterdeep and drow, forcing more interest in some topics than others. Streaming game groups like Critical Role also drive interest in various monsters and races on occasion (morkoth is currently top viewed). Otherwise, the top viewed pages in Popular Pages consistently show the main areas of interest are playable races and deities (suiting players making characters) and common monsters (suiting DMs making campaigns). We've got a lot of good monster coverage, but I believe common player races need development, and almost all our gods need a good deal of work.

Traffic
The Wiki Analytics Admin Dashboard (admin-only, sorry) tells us we currently get around 330,000 total views per day, 2,300,000 over the last week, and 9,725,600 over the last month. They wobble a lot but generally peak on weekends. They only go back a week and a month, and I'm afraid I haven't been recording these, but I think Moviesign has? I remember when these were around 100,000 and this is sitting at a maximum.

In any case, Quantcast records comparable data over longer periods, so I'll focus on its data. FANDOM uses Quantcast for website traffic data and analysis, and some of us admins have been allowed to look at it too. This where things get interesting, and kind of disturbing. One, there is a shocking amount of data on demographics and browsing and shopping activity. I don't know what I can and can't share here, or what's exact data or AI estimation. Anyway, I'll focus on FRW traffic.

First, the daily total page views, from 20 June 2019 to 18 July 2020: There's quite a lot of spikiness here. Once again, the peaks are on the weekends, centered on Sundays. I had thought this was due to weekend game days and campaign prep times, and I was right, more or less. This pattern is repeated for FANDOM as a whole and for Gamepedia and specific gaming wikis, and not for TV or movie franchises, unless the TV series comes out weekly. So people are more likely to play games, whether video games or tabletop roleplaying games, on their weekends, not surprisingly.

I'll note that the blue line above is US data and the grey line below is the rest of the world. These are flipped for FANDOM as a whole and in non-US franchises like Doctor Who. This is probably because D&D is still much more well known and popular in the USA than in other countries. We see significant dips at the 4 July (cancelling the Stranger Things S3 peak) and Thanksgiving that don't appear outside, and at Christmas, which is. There's also the BG3 peak again, obscured but more obvious in the non-US line.

Next, to smooth out the data, the weekly total page views, from 20 June 2019 to 18 July 2020: Now, we see some interesting behaviour. The lines are roughly constantly if slightly downward-sloping through the second half of 2019, which is more noticeable in the smoother monthly data. I wish I'd done this before Quantcast dumped everything back to October 2018 so I could see if this is seasonal but, IIRC, it was showing a steady rise the whole time. Then they reach a minimum in the Christmas period, as expected, and pick up for the start of 2020. And they go up and up, then down, then up, and plateau, then down, then up, and up... What happened? The pandemic did, of course.

But Quantcast has stopped cooperating and loading data, so I'll have to leave it here and come back and dig down into the data in more detail next time. — BadCatMan (talk) 12:36, July 20, 2020 (UTC)