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I believe theymos was on to that, as per his statement:
Here you go:
https://bitcointalk.org/merit.txt.xzSimilar to trust.txt.xz, it'll be updated weekly. It will show only the last 120 days of data; someone else should archive the old ones if you want them.
I am especially interested in analyses of this data which could point to sub-communities where the initial sMerit is exhausted and new sources are necessary, and people who might be good merit sources.
Edit: Note that for a little while I had user_to and user_from as names, but I decided to change it to IDs.
Lately Ive seen a couple of people postulating to become a Merit Source with a local board strong component, so hopefully these will increase with that idea in mind.
In terms of merit distribution per section/subsection, If we take a look from the 1st of July 2018 onwards, the Merit percentage awarded per section is as follows:
section subsection nMerit %
Alternate cryptocurrencies Altcoin Discussion 1039 4,41 %
Alternate cryptocurrencies Announcements (Altcoins) 2157 9,15 %
Alternate cryptocurrencies Marketplace (Altcoins) 549 2,33 %
Alternate cryptocurrencies Mining (Altcoins) 625 2,65 %
Alternate cryptocurrencies Speculation (Altcoins) 349 1,48 %
Bitcoin Bitcoin Discussion 1107 4,7 %
Bitcoin Bitcoin Technical Support 167 0,71 %
Bitcoin Development & Technical Discussion 928 3,94 %
Bitcoin Mining 351 1,49 %
Bitcoin Project Development 104 0,44 %
Deleted Deleted 790 3,35 %
Economy Economics 1926 8,17 %
Economy Marketplace 1574 6,68 %
Economy Trading Discussion 787 3,34 %
Local Arabic 35 0,15 %
Local Chinese 29 0,12 %
Local Croatian 152 0,64 %
Local Dutch 50 0,21 %
Local French 242 1,03 %
Local German 660 2,8 %
Local Greek 64 0,27 %
Local Indian 14 0,06 %
Local Indonesian 569 2,41 %
Local Italian 201 0,85 %
Local Japanese 76 0,32 %
Local Other Languages 77 0,33 %
Local Philippines 349 1,48 %
Local Polish 15 0,06 %
Local Portuguese 228 0,97 %
Local Romanian 4 0,02 %
Local Russian 2704 11,47 %
Local Spanish 347 1,47 %
Local Turkish 911 3,86 %
Other Archival 13 0,06 %
Other Beginners & Help 495 2,1 %
Other Meta 3029 12,85 %
Other Off-topic 189 0,8 %
Other Politics & Society 265 1,12 %
Other Serious discussion 406 1,72 %
The real issue really though is not down to which sections are less merited, but which lack merits in relation to the content/quality of the posts they bare. We can look at it numerically, and even ratio it to the number of posts being created, but the number of meritable posts that go unmerited needs to be scouted somehow visually in order to detect these situations. In the past I believe at some point we has a conversation going on on the matter, where ideas like having mods or trusted people give "alerts" on unmerited sections could help (the idea was to have trusted people alert on unmerited sections so a merit source could be considered).
One would say that Bitcoin Sections are extremely undermerited looking at the numbers, but I'd say that Merit Sources do visit those boards. Nevertheless, we also find plenty of spam there (Bitcoin Discussion), and the really technical stuff is not that easy to follow and neither do those sections have a large amount of posts on a daily basis.