How much credence can you put into numbers? Karen Traviss has been changing our perceptions on how the information behind the Clone Wars was handled by Chancellor Palpatine and his spin doctors (click here for more info), masterfully dishing out numbers to the general public in an effort to keep them properly scared and ready to accept any governmental changes the Chancellor deemed necessary.

In real life, there are always numbers that are meant to change our perceptions or motivate us. Nielsen ratings are used to get us to watch TV shows. Customer satisfaction ratings are smeared all over commercials, in an effort to ge us to buy a service or product. Gas mileage numbers versus gas prices... numbers are everywhere.

Anyhoo, I've been looking at the site statistics for the new encyclopedia site, and some of them appear to quite... well, awesome! I can't recall a time when I has seeing more than 1,000 pages served per day, and the data is showing that I've been doubling that number for the last two weeks. Up to yesterday, I was over 17,000 requests for the week that ends today. I can't claim credit for this, however. I owe it all to you, my loyal readers.

So, what can I discern from these numbers? Well, first and foremost, people are still interested in Star Wars, and in a pretty big way. Second, people are still interested in the encyclopedia, despite the fine site being created by the "second-best" reference site out there, the Wookieepedia.

A deeper look at these numbers reveals something interesting. In the past, the largest number of pages served were either the search page or the categories page (which has since been collapsed into the entries page). Lately, however, it seems that more people are interested in planets. More than twice as many hits have been experienced on the planets pages than search results.

Another weird tidbit... despite these numbers, the encyclopedia site is still #4 on the Google hitlist for Star Wars encyclopedias, stuck behind the old site (two links... go figure) and an absolutely ancient download on Tucows.com. (A special thanks goes out to Ryan Brooks over at Fandom Comics for helping me get this high!)

So, the old saying states that the numbers don't lie. Being a long-time project manager in my real job, I know that this is true. Palpatine's manipulations aside, I'm taking the above numbers as a sign of success, and I'll take another two seconds thank you - the readers - again for continuing to go to the encyclopedia.