About WikiStats

What is WikiStats?

Maintenalyzer is a comprehensive analytics platform designed to track and visualize category growth across Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation wikis. The platform provides insights into how different categories expand over time, helping researchers, editors, and enthusiasts understand the evolution of knowledge organization on Wikimedia projects.

How Data is Gathered

1. Gathering information from WikiData

From WikiData, we gather sitelinks to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis, about which categories to track. This list is manually curated, and if you want us to track more, you should contact User talk:Laaknor on metawiki with the item ID (Q-number) of the category your wiki is using to categorize a templates usage.

2. Gathering weekly data from the wikis

Every wiki category found from WikiData is checked weekly for the count of pages in the category (or if there are many subcategories, the count of pages in the subcategories). This is checked against the MediaWiki API.

3. Archive.org Integration for historical data

Maintenalyzer leverages the Internet Archive's comprehensive collection of Wikimedia database dumps. We systematically search and download historical database exports from archive.org/details/wikimediadownloads, and other sources for historical data, which contains complete snapshots of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis at different points in time.