Thanks to our excellent summer Outreachy intern Vaidehi Atpadkar, we’ve launched a major new feature for the global Programs & Events Dashboard: namespace-specific tracking and statistics.
Normally, the Dashboard only counts statistics — articles edited and created, amount of content added, and so on — for Mainspace (article) pages. But program organizers sometimes run events where it makes sense to count contributions to other namespaces — especially non-Mainspace content spaces, like the Cookbook namespace on Wikibooks. Improvements for tracking specific namespaces were one of the most-requested feature areas in last year’s Programs & Events Dashboard user survey, and were a high-priority item on the P & E Dashboard roadmap.
Vaidehi built the feature on top of some outstanding work from previous Outreachy intern Ivana Novaković-Leković. Ivana’s project added Wikidata-specific stats generation to the Dashboard background update system, along with a user interface for displaying those additional Wikidata stats below the total cumulative stats for each Wikidata-related program. With Vaidehi’s work, now we can also generate and display stats for a specific namespace, and the user interface lets us switch between specific namespaces (along with Wikidata stats) when there are multiple namespaces being tracked.
If you’ve been waiting for a way to get stats for non-Mainspace namespaces, please try out this new feature! You can set each namespace you want to count towards the statistics by adding it to the “Tracked Namespaces” in the Details section of a program page, and if your program has already ended you can use the “Schedule Data Update” button to add it to queue to regenerate the statistics with the new namespaces. By default, the Dashboard will still just track mainspace edits for each wiki that doesn’t have a Tracked Namespaces entry. Let us know how it works for you, and any ideas you have for improving this feature!
