[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #6511: Provide helpful plugin stats and insights

[Making WordPress.org]

#6511: Provide helpful plugin stats and insights
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 Reporter:  markzahra         |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  feature request   |      Status:  new
 Priority:  high              |   Milestone:
Component:  Plugin Directory  |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                    |
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Comment (by dd32):

 > However, it is possible that wp.org may provide more data to certain
 users than others, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

 To be clear: WordPress.org doesn't share the exact number, other than the
 publicly shown rounded sets, however a number of ''trusted individuals''
 who work on WordPress.org have access to some data that is not publicly
 shown, ''as it's required for their contributions'', they're trusted not
 to share any data publicly that is not publicly relevant or should be
 considered private or unverified (or statistically maybe not 100% correct
 - which is the case for Active Installs, and why we round them the way we
 do).

 Plugins don't get preferential treatment based on the author or who they
 know. The data made available to a plugin with 100 active installs is the
 same as what's made available to plugins with millions of installs.

 There are many ways in which plugins and services have estimated a plugins
 usage, it's incredibly easy for some plugins like SEO plugins that have a
 "finger print" on the front end of the site (Such as kind-of-unique HTML
 comments or HTML tags) to be estimated simply by knowing that the entire
 web is "XXX million sites" and by having a script crawl the top 10million,
 and extrapolating from that, you can get a statistical number that's
 ''probably'' close to the actual number. I routinely employ this method
 myself to validate the WordPress.org public stats, to check that
 ''WordPress.org data'' is ''likely correct''.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511#comment:129>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
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