I think it would be a lot of fun if you had a page that had community stats. As beginner+, it would be great to see for example:
- how much other beginners, intermediates and experts are studying in terms of time
- how many words per week they are adding;
- how you compare against the community. Are you learning fast or slow?
- #s of subscribers for lists (i.e. different text books) - maybe people who are using different text books are learning and retaining faster?
- also, the competition would be great as a way to push yourself - maybe leaderboards (one for the community overall and then broken out by beginners, intermediate and experts)
- wishful thinking: a badge system, maybe? Badges for finishing certain lists or text books or achieving retention of a certain # of words?

On another note, the ability to follow other learners and see what they are working on would be cool too.

I like it :).

Although i am not against general statistics, studying a language is not a competition and it is not right to compare yourself with someone unless you know their full story. You cannot compare the learning speed of someone who is working full time with a student dedicating his whole week to Chinese.
And also skritter settings play a role on how much you study; e.g. do you review only writing or also def, pinyin, tones etc, what retention rate do you use..

I really like the Skritter challenges because they are meant to improve your self without competing with others. I also like to see some general statistics on how many 'experienced' people skritter has and how many 'beginners' but when it become too 'personal' i am not in favour of it.

No it's not a competition, but I do want to know whomis doing well and most of all WHY? Then I am going to copy to the best of my ability their most effective habits The only way to know who does what the best is to measure. I am always interested in knowing how to do things better, without a frame of reference I have no idea if I am doing the best I can.

As an example, I told my teacher that I was basically learningan average of 3 words per day by studying 1 hour per day. Her reply was this wasnt very good. She told me I should be learning 5 per day with the amount of time Im putting in.
Right now I have no way to check whether her claim is true or not. Why do I care? Well, I am putting a lot of time into this and if I am doing something wrong that is causing me not to learn as efficiently as possible, Id like to know. The only way to do that is to compare yourself to other students and the community as whole.

But what does 1 hour of study mean? Some people go to classes, learn new words and characters there and just add them to skritter as a kind of database to maintain them. Other people study lists from scratch and learn the new words through skritter. Then they need much more 'skritter time' before they actually know the word. Just to say that it is very difficult to compare numbers without background.
Another thing is the retention rate; the lower you put it, the more you learn in a short time but you what you know it less accurate; the higher you put the retention rate you need to spend much more skritter time because you get much more reviews... so how are you going to factor that all in?
Personally i have learned a lot through this forum from what the more experienced people write, than what i would learn from cold statistics.

Obviously, you are an anti-quantitative person and I am not going to try to convince you otherwise. Thats your perspective and I respect it. I certainly recognize many statistics and measurements are deeply flawed. I deal with flawed metrics everyday. However, from a personal standpoint, I'd prefer deeper analytics and would find much more value in having more benchmarks, even if flawed, from which to judge my learning efficiency and progress. It's a personal preference and it may or may not be right approach for everyone. If they did implement these kind of features, I'm sure you could choose to opt out or ignore it completely if you feel very strongly against it.

I am with you this one; we don't need to convince each other, we are just on both sides of the scale. And while there may be many people that share your view i also wanted to express that there are others who may not be keen on being included in all kinds of comparisons and statistics.

Hi Marlee, I believe you would be able to opt out of being included in the stats and comparisons by setting your profile to private :)

I tend to side with marleendemol on this one.

I'm sure you could generate some statistics in an attempt to parameterize the "success" of a Skritterer, but I'm not convinced that these metrics would hold any value beyond novelty.

I would rather the developers spend their time implementing more immediately beneficial features.

I like the idea of comparison stats mainly for the novelty of it. Sometimes I am skrittering and I'm doing so well that I just keep going and going. Other times I have to stop because I'm going to work or bed, but it'd be fun to see where I rank compared to people who have similar settings to me as well as to others that devote a similar about of time per day. Maybe it'd also be partially useful to see which settings allow for the most effective learning (or at least for a specific learner's desired learning curve), but of course that would be difficult to measure and could be misleading. As long as it's seen more as a novelty I think it'd be a cool feature.

On the other hand I think シャク nailed it. There are many other possible features that would be significantly more useful. Maybe our more fleeting dreams will be realized once the skritter developers have more free time on their hands (if that ever happens).

Leaderboards and badges have been in the works for some time (at least a year, maybe more). I think the Skritter guys have been pretty clear that anyone who wants to opt out can select the "private profile" option.

Yep, leaderboards and badges, as James said, are on our to do list. I imagine sometime later this year, but you can never really tell with these things! We'll see how those go and then work from there.

Thanks Scott - I'm really looking forward to those!