"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"
This quote, attributed to Benjamin Disraeli should grant me
immunity for what I am about to present; Last Saturday, JayBonci
pulled off a gigantic datafile from the E2 server. After some
post-processing, I was able to do a statistical analysis on all
of the node and noder data. These statistics are now available on the E2
server.
The analysis sheds some light on frequently reoccurring questions
such as:
- How many active noders does E2 have?
- What's a good average node reputation? How does my noding compare to
that of other noders?
- What is "good" XP or Node-Fu?
The document also gives some insight in the Level Advancement System. As the statistics show, (and most
noders already know this), it is much more difficult to meet the
writeup requirements than the XP requirements in order to
level-up. This suggests that it may be time to raise the XP
requirements, in order to promote higher quality writing. Or perhaps the
Level Advancement System needs to be reworked completely to a system
based on writeup reputation, instead of XP.
I have talked to dem bones and several other gods, and changes in the Level Advancement system are on the horizon. Two fundamental problems stand in our way:
- 'Change frightens us'
- database strain / lag - this is our number one concern
Whether the change is based on
XP,
MNFP, or otherwise is still up in the air. These statistics may serve as a resource for this issue. The statistical analysis can be found at:
http://everything2.com/stats
For a better understanding of some of the terms used in the document,
please read my writeups on Median Node-Fu, and Median Node-Fu Product. In
case you're not too familiar with statistical terms, the mean and
median writeups are also useful.
To keep the E2 frontpage clean, I adressed the numerous comments in Everything Statistics - September 29, 2001 (2). Also see my October 5, 2001 writeup.