Was the experiment a success?

[Earl McGehee]

Is the experiment of this community built hurricane web site a success? Is there any interest or support for continuing to design something that might address the next hurricane or disaster more efficiently?

I started a collection of other disaster portals and wikis and related sites to see what other people have done: http://delicious.com/ejmc/disaster. The most interesting site is the Disaster Portal Project.

[John Walling]

Without end user metrics and polling, evaluating success is subjective.

Over time, I look for progress in usable content; team participation; continuity between disasters; and the best uses of technologies. Overall, I give our project a B+.

If the current wiki is to be useful in the future, it will have to be maintained, otherwise spammers will hack it to death. During slack periods the following measures are needed: 1) logins should be required for edits, 2) external Spam-blacklists added, and 3) one or two extensions should be added to block spambots, examples: Akismetcheck, AntiBot, ConfirmEdit, reCAPTCHA, SpamRegex, and/or wiki-httpbl,

Besides the Disaster Portal Project, another project worth a close look is Sahana:
http://www.sahana.lk/overview

I am keeping a list of useful disaster sites on my user page:
http://www.hurricanewiki.org/wiki/User:Jwalling

~John

[Earl McGehee]

The limited stats on the wiki would seem to reflect that the majority of the visits to the wiki are by our editors. The most popular page after the home page is shelters with only 3,232 hits for the life of the wiki.

I agree about maintenance of the wiki, but it might be 3 weeks or 3 years before it is used again for a US hurricane. The activity on this web site seems to indicate that everyone has moved on. We will have to actively recruit volunteers to keep going.

Would our time be better spent working on the Wikipedia Hurricane portal? We would benefit from their administration.

If we broadened our scope beyond US hurricanes maybe we could build more on-going traffic and justify more administrative overhead.

Your list of links is nice - a added many of them to my list.

[Brad Banner]

"Would our time be better spent working on the Wikipedia Hurricane portal? We would benefit from their administration." No they don't allow link lists and many of the things we did on the wiki and on http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/main.html . on wikipedia. Two different critters.

I think over time we will get more hits and the next time we will get plenty. This site and the wiki were not heavily promoted this time that I could tell. Katrina was a slowly evolving disater over weeks as was the asian tsunami.

" During slack periods the following measures are needed: 1) logins should be required for edits, 2) external Spam-blacklists added, and 3) one or two extensions should be added to block spambots, examples: Akismetcheck, AntiBot, ConfirmEdit, reCAPTCHA, SpamRegex, and/or wiki-httpbl, "
Very much agree.

See http://quakehelp.asiaquake.org/qh/index.php?title=Aid_Agencies&... for what happens to an unprotected site.

[John Walling]

asiaquake.org is a good case study of spambots at work. All the spam hits look like anonymous users. I have already taken step 1) logins required for edits. (See forum topic: Wiki Tunes.) I will add the other measures as needed.
~ John Walling

Brad Banner said:

" During slack periods the following measures are needed: 1) logins should be required for edits, 2) external Spam-blacklists added, and 3) one or two extensions should be added to block spambots, examples: Akismetcheck, AntiBot, ConfirmEdit, reCAPTCHA, SpamRegex, and/or wiki-httpbl, "
Very much agree.

See http://quakehelp.asiaquake.org/qh/index.php?title=Aid_Agencies&... for what happens to an unprotected site.

[Ben Tremblay]

I'd be interested in seeing data on exit pages. Are visitors heading to primary sources? That would suggest that they're users with actual needs. Or are they headed to news sites? I'd take that to indicate that they're browsing more for entertainment.

[Brad Banner]

It is according to which news sources they are clicking on and from where. If you get clicks on the Houston, Galveston and Beaumont area media sites from San Antonio, DFW, East Texas or Austin, it could be evacuees looking to see what is going on back home and when they can go home. If you get clicks on the Houston, Galveston and Beaumont area media sites from the Houston, Galveston and Beaumont areas, it is probably non-evacuees looking for the latest information.

The local government sites in the affected areas that were added are functioning exactly as I hoped the governments would use them. For the most part, they are chock full of the latest news and information for evacuees and non-evacuees. Even some of the least promising government sites (when I added them) are full of useful info. Local government site in places that people evacuated to also have some good information on them.

We got quite a few hits on the Shelters area. Somebody was using the information. Some of the hits are certainly editing hits, but not nearly all of them.

[Earl McGehee]

Apparently Google Analytics is enabled for our Wiki? Does anyone have access to this? It would tell us where people are that visit the site, who referred them, and much more.

[John Walling]

I didn't install the GA extension and I don't have access to the GA account. I can retrieve the UA number, but that is not sufficient to get the data. Deanna Zandt might have GA access. (gustav at deannazandt com)
~ John

Earl McGehee said:

Apparently Google Analytics is enabled for our Wiki? Does anyone have access to this? It would tell us where people are that visit the site, who referred them, and much more.

[Earl McGehee]

If you inquire about the domain name at Googla Analytics it says it is not enabled. But if you look at Special Pages > Version in the Wiki it shows Tim Laqua installed the GA Integration Extension. If you click the GA Integration link on that page it has installation instructions.

Thanks for checking this John. I don't suppose there is any hurry now.

[Earl McGehee]

Here is a summary of stats for the WIKI site:
Site created Sept 1 - got more visitors that day than any day since (3,255 visits, 7,212 page views, ). This was when Hurricane Gustav was approaching the US.
Second peak was Sept 12 when Ike was approaching when we got 814 visitors and 2,122 page views.
Since inception an average of 62% of visitors never go past the wiki home page and 86% of visitors never came back.

44% of visitors came to us directly from Google, 7% from the Ning site and 14% came directly to the site (i.e. they had a link saved on their computer). Most of the Google searches that sent people to us included the word wiki in the search string (87%).

From the home page here is the breakdown for the next page view for those that visited the home page and stayed on our site (only 38% of visitors did this): Interactive Maps (6%), Who is doing what (5%), Special-Recent changes (3%), Shelters List of Locations (3%), Twitter resources (2%), News Resources (2%), Shelters (2%), Talk (2%), Blogs (2%), Ham Radio Resources (2%), College Student (2%), Get Help Now (2%), Aid Agencies (2%), Ike (2%), Animal Rescue Resources (2%), and so on. Note that Google doesn't track what external sites visitors exited to from our site.

Pageviews since Sept 1 in rank order: Main Page (22%), Shelters Texas (6%), Interactive Maps (3%), Shelters List of Locations (2%), Helpline Numbers (2%).

After the US we had visitors in Sept from the UK (679), Germany (586), Canada (405), Australia (127) and many other countries in much smaller numbers. Much of this traffic is a result of the BBC adding a link to the wiki on their Americas news site on 9/1 and Spiegal Online adding a link on their German language news site that day.

Conclusions:
1. We need to feature the Wiki better on the Ning site - seems that should be the source of more of our visits to the wiki home page. (Note this was improved in mid Sept but with little noticeable effect.)
2. We need to rethink the Wiki home page to attract more visitors to stay on our site. Two thirds of our visitors either thought we did not have the information they were looking for or this was not the site that they expected - they never went past the home page.