WikiStats is a pretty simple Wikipedia extension for Firefox that tracks how many Wikipedia articles have you read over the last 90 days. It will show total number of articles you read on Wikipedia in a span of 90 days. It also shows a nice graph that shows the number of articles you read everyday. In fact, you can also see the number of articles read by hour of the day. In addition to this, it also shows the articles that you read most (in case you read the same article multiple times), and number of times article read.
How to Track Wikipedia Activity on Firefox:
This is just a fun to have extension of Firefox, with not much real use (IMHO). Once you install this extension, it will keep working in the background and will keep tracking your Wikipedia activity (only the articles that you read on Wikipedia; not any edits that you make in Wikipedia). There is a small icon of this extension added next to the address bar and you can click on that anytime to see your Wikipedia stats over last 90 days.
You can get this extension from link available at the end of this review. Just click on that to install this extension to your Firefox.
Once installed, there is not much that you have to do; just browse like you normally do, and whenever you read an article on Wikipedia, this extension will record that.
Here are some of the statistics that this extension displays:
Total Articles Viewed: This shows the total number of articles that you have viewed on Wikipedia in last 90 days. Unfortunately, it even counts visits to Wikipedia homepage as one article and even any search performed on Wikipedia is counted as an article. So, basically, whenever you visit any page on Wikipedia, it increments the counter by one. Thankfully, this problem is pretty much taken care by the next stat.
Total Unique Articles Viewed: This, I believe, is a more useful stat. It shows total unique articles that you viewed over last 90 days. It will also include visits to Wikipedia homepage, but all visits to the homepage will be counted as 1 only, and not multiple.
Average Articles Per Day: This simply shows Total articles viewed / 90. This metric is actually not intelligently calculated. Instead of always dividing by 90, it should intelligently see if the extension has been installed for less than 90 days, then it should take those number of days in the denominator.
Most Visited Articles: This shows the articles that you have visited most, as well as number of times you have visited them. Don’t be surprised to see Wikipedia homepage also in that.
Total Articles Viewed, by day of week: This is a nice graph that shows total articles that you view daily on Wikipedia. Its kinda fun to watch this graph.
Total Articles viewed by hour of day: This shows total number of articles viewed on Wikipedia as per hour of the day. Another nice looking graph.
That’s pretty much all that is there to this extension.
My Opinion About WikiStats Extension for Firefox:
This is a fun to have extension that shows Wikipedia stats in lots of different ways. However, I feel that the extension developers can easily extend this extension to record stats for all the websites (like, these Chrome extensions do), which will make this extension much more useful. Also, even for Wikipedia, it does not track the time that I spend on that; only counts the number of articles. Nonetheless, if you are a crazy fan of Wikipedia, this extension can help you track how many articles do you really read on Wikipedia.
