[ckan-discuss] More interesting sort metrics for pages

Mon Feb 6 18:52:25 GMT 2012

Pages on thedatahub.org like /user, /tag, /group, /dataset etc. are a 
bit boring/useless because they show things ordered alphabetically. The 
/user page, for example, always shows the same the users with names 
beginning with 'a', most of whom have 0 datasets and 0 edits. (There is 
a tab for sorting users by total number of edits instead, but it's not 
selected by default.)

Should we sort things by some sort of metric such as top rated or most 
active? Lets us showcase the good stuff first, and also turns it into a 
bit of a game, like how on Stack Overflow /users shows the users with 
the most reputation this week.

I prefer metrics that lets the page change over time depending on what 
has been happening recently, e.g. most edits in the past week or month, 
rather than metrics like most edits in total which will tend to peg the 
same people at the top of the list.

This would also nicely align the sorting of the pages with the little 
0*0 badges (num. datasets and num. edits I guess) that we show next to 
users and big and prominently on the user's pages. (These badges are 
quite similar to Stack Overlofw.)

We already have some stuff like this on thedatahub.org/stats. I think 
these could be folded into the /user, /tag, /group and /dataset pages 
and we could get rid of the /stats page:

/dataset
Sorted by amount of activity in the past week.
Have tabs for sorting the datasets in other ways: by total activity, by 
top rated, by name.
Show the nice 'Total number of Datasets' and 'Revisions to Datasets per 
week' graphs from the top of the /stats page at the top of the /datasets 
page instead? (But perhaps make them a bit smaller.)

/user, /group, /tag
Sorted by amount of activity in the past week, with tabs for sorting by 
total activity, datasets owned, or name.

'Amount of activity' could be number of edits (which is what we 
currently use) or it could be number of activity stream activities.

That covers everything from the /stats page moved into the other pages, 
would make the other pages much more useful and interesting, and we can 
get rid of the stats page.