Charles Miller, Confluence Architect

A commenter on a previous blog post asked how much use the Atlassian internal wiki gets. I have no idea if these statistics will be interesting to anyone, but somebody asked, right?

A bit of background first. Our internal Confluence instance has been running since late 2003, back when Atlassian had a staff count in the single digits. Since then we've pretty much doubled in size every year to our current total of around 125 staff. In that time we've amassed:

  • 65 global spaces, 150 personal spaces.
  • 106,600 revisions of 10,400 pages, by 176 unique authors, with 2300 comments.
  • 3,000 blog posts by 130 unique authors with 5,700 comments.

In a totally meaningless comparison, that makes our wiki one tenth of one percent the size of Wikipedia. On the other hand, Wikipedia averages only slightly less than two pages for each registered user, so we're a lot busier per capita. :)

The average of ten edits per page seems a little low (Wikipedia averages 16). It might be more interesting to see a distribution graph, since many pages (timesheets and meeting minutes, for example) will 'settle' quickly and are unlikely to see much editing, while at the other end of the scale there are a couple of pages that are updated every day (or even every hour) by automated scripts.

The "busiest" space is our support space, which has 270 pages, but 20,000 edits. In contrast, most personal spaces average two or three edits per page, perhaps reflecting their less collaborative nature.

Most of the 3,000 blog posts have been made in the last year. Blogging only really took off inside Atlassian when we added personal spaces to Confluence mid-2006. By way of contrast, the top ten spaces by page count are all "global spaces", while nine of the top ten spaces by blog-post count are personal.

The most prolific blogger inside the company is me, with 200 posts (and 453 comments) in my personal space. Four spaces have more than 100 posts, 16 more than 50, and 78 have at least ten blog posts. Not a bad participation rate, given half the company wasn't even here a year ago.

(This data was gathered using the Global Statistics Plugin)

1 Comment(s)

Thanks. I used to administer a wiki in quite a large organisation and I was mesmerised by the Global statistics. They invariably depressed me because our wiki was in its infancy and had very little activity.

I'd love to work in an organisation with a vibrant internal blogging culture. It's a great outlet for creative employees to air their ideas. I might broach the subject with my current employer.

By Charlie at September 26, 2007 11:27 AM

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