Starting this July, Bitergia is working with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to analyze their free software projects and related communities. This includes MediaWiki, the software that makes Wikipedia possible. A first (still pre-beta) version of a development dashboard for these projects is already available at Wikimedia Labs. During the next weeks, it will be improved to show detailed information about the most relevant metrics for Wikimedia communities and development processes, and their evolution over time.
The WMF is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The WMF operates some of the largest collaborative projects worldwide, including Wikipedia.
Bitergia is using for this project the *Grimoire (MetricsGrimoire and vizGrimoire) software development analytics platform, which is itself free / open source software, thus matching perfectly the aims of the WMF. Improvements to *Grimoire that will result of this collaboration will revert as free software to the platform, and all the datasets and information produced will be made freely available.
For us, this is an amazing project with amazing people. WMF already has a great team doing Wikipedia Analytics, and collecting community metrics. We at Bitergia are having the opportunity of joining them to push the state of the art in analytics for communities and processes related to technology development.
Quim Gil, from the Wikimedia Foundation, announced some days ago the project kick-off. It has a planned duration of one year, and it will be totally developed in the open, in the context of Wikimedia Analytics.
