[Ambassadors] Ambassador counting by region

[Fabian Affolter]

Hi all,

This is my approach to get more (and hopefully better) metrics about the 
Ambassadors Project with my poor python programming skills. During March 
I added the new ambassadors by hand to the statistics page [1]. That's 
not the way we want to go...Francesco Crippa made a python script [2] to 
count the members of the Fedora Ambassadors Project. His idea was to 
collect the diffs of the Country List page [3].  Unfortunately this page 
is updated manually and because of that not very reliable.  IMHO the 
better way is to get the data from the several category pages (for 
example CategoryAmbassadorsFrance).  The personal wiki pages of the 
ambassadors are often more up-to-date because Thomas Chung add the 
category after verification.

My script is quite simple and at the moment just a working prototype.

There is a list of countries.  With this list the script will get all 
links from the category pages (incl. the wiki names), then do some work 
with regex and print out a number.  This number is the count of all 
ambassadors in the selected countries.  Download the script and improve 
it [4].

If you are a python pro feel free to tell me what I can do better in 
this script.  Any kind of suggestions are welcome.

Maybe I will expand this script in the future.  I would like to have a 
log function (writing the data to a file with time and data),  selection 
of the area through user input, and some other small thing like error 
handling and a test if the the script got all data form the Fedora wiki. 
  At the moment with moinmoin it's a pain and there have to be more than 
one run to get all the data, 502 Proxy Error...sooner or later 
everything will be fine with mediawiki.  Send your ideas for more 
extensions and code snippets to me ;-)

If you want to help us to collect more and detailed data for metrics and 
statistics about the Ambassadors Project step up.  FAmSco will 
appreciate your work because this ways we (or better Max) can ensure 
that we get money for the promotion of Fedora from RH.  Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

Fabian

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/Statistics
[2] 
http://people.byte-code.com/fcrippa/2008/02/18/more-stats-for-fedora-ambassadors/
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors/CountryList
[4] http://fab.fedorapeople.org/misc/scripts/ambassadors/amb_count.py