Wiki Stats and What They Mean

On the first of every month I pull the statistics for our intranet at work, which is a wiki system (MediaWiki to be precise). In the months of September and October there were about 4,000 page views for each month. In November, the stats I pulled today are telling me that we had 11,000 page views, more than the past two months combined.

What isn't clear from the raw data is why that might be the case, but I have a few ideas about that:

1. New features - the HR training schedule and sign-ups and a look-up page for our contacts database are now both on the wiki, along with the staff directory (via a frame of the existing non-wiki page). These are high-demand services, so having them on the wiki drives traffic to it.
   
2. Critical mass - the wiki has now been in place for several months, so perhaps people have finally become comfortable enough with it that they turn to it as the default place to go looking for information.
   
3. Front page - the page view stats for the main page of the wiki show the most dramatic change, more than doubling in a single month. I suspect that we have finally gotten people to change their bookmarked links so they're going automatically to the new intranet home page instead of the old. In fact, the total increase in page views can be almost entirely accounted for by the number of additional front page hits beyond the expected increase.

What will be most interesting is to see if these new, higher numbers hold in the future. December is likely to be a fluke month, with everyone off on vacations, so I'll probably have to wait until February 1, when the January statistics are pulled, to confirm whether this is a blip or a trend. I hope it's a trend, because I happen to think that our wiki is a really amazing resource for staff, and I'd love to see people taking advantage of that.