3 Million Views

3 Million Views
Aug 22, 2014

I reached 3 million views on my wiki pages this week. Not a huge accomplishment, but in some ways a validation that wikis provide a convenient and effective way of storing information. I always recommend wikis to people in need of a system for cataloguing various documents that can easily be uploaded, created, edited, and deleted when needed.

I use my main wiki system (mediawiki's excellent wiki package) for class material, research, and to document various computer-related recipes or solutions I come up with from time to time, and that I know I will need in the future. I have all my syllabi, course material, homework, solutions, exams dating back to 2005 on line. Pdfs of most of my research papers. Tutorials I create mostly for myself on about every new language or computer system I teach myself. These tutorials, actually, contribute to the most of the 3,000,000 views I logged. Google Analytics is a nice tool to figure out how a set of Web pages is accessed. 85% of accesses to my pages are from Web searches, 10% from referrals from other pages (possibly mine). The most popular pages are for my Arduino-XBee tutorial, indicating a strong interest in micro-controllers out there, and for my cloud-computing pages on the use of Hadoop. More details on the statistics can be found here, and the list of most viewed pages here.

Note that not all of my pages are public, as I protect some of them (for example homework solutions) and restrict them to either myself only, or to computers with a given IP address (only Smith college campus, for example).

In short, wikis are good!