river wrote:

browser statistics are already available at
http://www2.knams.wikimedia.org/stats/

screen resolution is a pain to collect and i doubt it's worth the effort...

nigelenki wrote:

Those stats are rather useless as a research tool. What is the market growth of
the Linux and OSX operating systems, how many people still have Windows 98, what
browsers are most common, which is most used on OSX? TBH I'd rather somewhere
useful like Google supply this info; but I know a lot of people who use
Wikipedia with various browsers and OSes, so it looks like a good information
source.

river wrote:

if you'd like to provide some more constructive input than "useless", perhaps
we could look at implementing the statistics you want. (describing what
exactly you'd like to see would be a good start).

Wikipedia is not your market research tool, and insulting the project isn't
likely to make people want to do free work for you.

nigelenki wrote:

re Comment 3:
The stats there pretty much show which Wikipedia pages are most accessed, how
much traffic Wiki gets hourly and daily, who refers to Wikipedia, and what the
user agent is. Although the first three are useful in the engineering of
Wikipedia's servers and are perhaps interesting to some people, they're on the
whole disinteresting applied to any other task or Web site. Wikipedia gets a
lot of hits on Harry Potter, perhaps Harry Potter should be given attention and
cleaned up as best possible; that doesn't mean some random Web site should
design based around Harry Potter, though ;)

The user agent stats are pretty bland. Are we mostly inable to tell that
Internet Explorer comes from Windows 95 versus Windows XP? Or that Firefox (the
second user agent) comes from Windows, Linux, or OSX? Based on that chart, I
sure can't tell.

Some useful stats would be measurements of which browser and which OS are in
use; screen resolution is pretty much accepted as being 800x600 or higher,
although having numbers would be nice, but you said it's a pain to collect.

Re Comment 4:
I don't see why you're being hostile. Look at all the information you can
gather from Wikipedia about operating systems, Web browsers, computers, stem
cell research, food, sex, and TV shows. There are articles that talk about
Linux, Windows, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Web browsers in general; there are
comparisons of features in some articles too. For example:

• The 'Linux' article: "Its market share for desktops is rapidly growing. According to market

research company IDC, 25% of servers and 2.8% of desktop computers were already
running Linux in 2002. However, argued advantages ... have spurred a growing
number of high-profile cases of mass adoption of Linux by corporations and
governments. The Linux market is among the fastest growing and is projected to
exceed $35.7 billion by 2008."

• The 'Operating system advocacy' article claims "estimated" market shares,

although the estimates aren't exactly backed well or updated continuously.

• The 'Mozilla Firefox' article estimates the market share of Mozilla Firefox
  
  While it's nice that these articles talk about market share of OSes and Web

browsers, it's similar to opening an old book you bought; the data was iffy when
it was written, and it's not getting any more accurate as time passes. You have
to wait for the next release to get updated stats. Even on Wikipedia, the "next
release" of the article tends to not be the next day, at least not with
pertainence to statistics. Being able to refer to something like 'Special:Usage
statistics' would be nice.

Looking at the stats link given in Comment 2, the data needed to derive this
information from is not all there. Hence, for this purpose the data given is
effectively 'useless', about as much as using a single equation to solve for two
or more unknown values is 'useless'.