Statistics everywhere

For the past few days, I have been bombarded with statistics.

Firstly, we received a mail from one of the professors of our department that the proxy access provided to us is being used for stuff which severely deteriorates the performance of the server resulting in extremely slow access speeds for everyone (the technical reason for the same was that the server runs out of file descriptors). As such, three users were barred from using their accounts.

After sometime we received a mail from someone else who wanted written applications from 20 students. These were the top 20 students whose accounts have seen the maximum activity. They were to explain why such a thing was happening. One of them was a guy from our group. The mail contained a link to a page giving all the statistics regarding the proxy usage for this month with details about the hits, the files and the Kbytes in question. It contained bar graphs and pie charts as well as the top sites being visited.

One strange thing (as I see it) is that Wikipedia was not present in the top sites being visited. I myself am an avid user of the same (as you might have noticed from the links in my post) and if it were the statistics of the sites I visit, Wikipedia would have been the clear winner.

So, a little depressed, I open the main page of the site. As if it had responded, the site’s main page had undergone a change for good. There was colours and categorization and yes, statistics. So, I moved on to the Statistics page to see what was in store for me. What I saw, I am quoting here:

“Wikipedia currently has 1,040,724 articles.

That number excludes redirects, discussion pages, image description pages, user profile pages, templates, help pages, portals, articles without links to other articles, and pages about Wikipedia. Including these, we have 3,709,474 pages. We have 399,806 uploaded files.

Users have made 46,789,105 edits, an average of 12.61 per page, since July 2002.

We have 1,133,674 registered user accounts, of which 855 (or 0.08%) belong to administrators.”

There were other charts and tables. And I was again confident that sooner, if not already, it would be the most visited site.