Would there be any interest in exposing some aggregate usage stats?
I very often see posts on the forum wondering if people are going too slow, or if they are not accurate enough, or if they are in some other way inadecuate.
A lot of those posts are looking for moral support, to avoid feeling like they’re not “doing WaniKani properly”, and although the community is often very good at jumping into those threads to tell people not to worry about that, and just keep at their own pace (which is very good advice) I feel like there’s probably a lot of people who get discouraged before even getting to the point of creating a thread.
I think a page that provided official aggregated usage stats might help assuage some of these questions. Stuff like the distribution of accuracy per level, or the distribution of level-up times. That sort of thing. There’s loads of ways to slice this up.
So far WaniKani has been leaning on their awesome API to allow people to calculate these stats, but these only allow for per-user stats, which will obviously be biased even if us regular users aggregated them somehow.
There was a question about this back in 2018 but that seemed to have been asking more about whether that page existed already (and got no official response), whereas I’m interested in promoting the creation of a visible page like that (which I assume must exist in some capacity internally).
The post I linked to mentioned that it might discourage users who are at the bottom of those distributions. I think that may be true. But I imagine it would rather be a huge boost in confidence for most.
Some examples of threads where this would be useful
Personally I would really like to see those stats. I wouldn’t feel bad if I’m going slower than most people because I’m wk-ing at a pace that’s manageable for me and I’m ok with it, but I can totally see how someone might get discouraged by something like that too
I’d be really interested to look into the stats. Although it could be a challenge for WK team to build a page with useful aggregated stats.
As for user created stats, WK Stats (maintained by @rfindley as far as I know) seems to be collecting the api keys, so it would be possible to get WKStats’ users stats given their consent.
As a data engineer, I personally would be willing to help out with the community dashboard project.
That’s a neat thread, but other than Koichi’s data tidbit, it’s still mostly data that has ben gathered by users from more or less publicly available sources (the forums, the users of wkstats, etc).
I suspect that these self-selecting sources of information give a skewed picture (even if it’s the only picture we currently can see).
What I have in mind is more of a from-the-horse’s-mouth thing, for an un-skewed global view of things.
