WikiCreativityIndex

Wiki Creativity Index (WCI) ?

Everyday in the news, we are told the Stock Market index about the movement or trends in the financial markets. But we have no real or direct impact on those indexes. We are just there to consume those bad or good news without having a real impact. Often, there are also critics around the validity of such metrics. But what can we do ?

So to counterbalance those indexes, I have created a small index called the Wiki Creativity Index (WCI) to monitor the evolution of creativity (and activity) in the wiki world. The index is targeting all the wiki talking about wiki technologies and their use. The idea can be extended to any other area generating RSS where people actively contribute.

By looking at the WCI, we can have a real impact : "If you see the Wiki Creativity Index going down, you can contribute to those wikis the next day to improve them…" I think it's more useful to have information about an index or a metric where we have a direct and real influence or impact on.

WCI

Sparkline version

Standard overloaded "stocks" version

(as of Today) Wiki Creativity Index (WCI) is composed of

• Oddmuse - http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/oddmuse?action=rss
• Communitywiki - http://www.communitywiki.org/en?action=rss;days=3;all=0;showedit=0
• Usemod wiki - http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?action=rss&days=3
• Wiki Index - http://wikiindex.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&days=3&feed=atom
• (Broken no date in RSS feed items ;-) http://c2.com/cgi/wikiRss?min=0&days=20
• Wiki patterns- http://www.wikipatterns.com/createrssfeed.action?types=page&types=comment&sort=modified&showContent=true&showDiff=true&spaces=wikipatterns&labelString=&rssType=atom&maxResults=20&timeSpan=5&publicFeed=true&title=Wikipatterns.com+RSS+Feed

Could you add a feed in the Wiki Creativity Index (WCI)

Sure as long as the wiki is about the creativity in wiki technologies or their use. Feel free to add a comment on this page or send me a mail (a-@-foo-be / remove the hyphen).

Technical Details

The Wiki Creativity Index (WCI) is using rsscount.py part of my RssAny free software. Data are stored in a file using standard GNU tools and the graph are generated using ploticus. The process is running every 6 hours.

WCI is not a real index

That's true currently this is only the contribution made intra-day (e.g. like stocks volume). There is no starting price for a contribution so this is not really comparable to a financial index. But ideas are welcome to make it like a real index…

Value of an RSS item ?

As the WCI counts the occurrence items in RSS feeds, we don't add a value to each RSS item. I think that's very difficult to add a value to a wiki contribution. By the number of line added ? changed ? removed (sometime removing content can be a valuable contribution) ? reordering content is also a good contribution but also difficult to evaluate. That's why just count the occurrence.

TODO

• Export raw data (requested by Jean-Etienne)
• Export RSS/Atom (requested by Jean-Etienne)
• A real index instead of having contribution on 24 hours ? But in that index case when adding new feeds, the value must equally increased. (the opposite for removing) - To be evaluated (requested by Jean-Etienne)