I think documenting the evolution of the packages would be interesting. People use Wikipedia data to study online collaborative writing and the structure of big projects. Having everything in github repos will allow people in the future to do any analysis they want.
For the current usage we could make some observations about how people are using the language and standard library. For instance collect all the calls to functions in Base to see what is getting the most use and the least use. It might help direct focus on changing the library. We might find some useful functions that aren't advertised well enough. Or some functions that are used everywhere and could benefit from improvement. Also I am interested in the dependency network, which we can get out of the REQUIRE files. Which packages are providing functionality that many others depend on in an indirect way? These would be important packages to keep well maintained because if they fail many other packages will fail. What are the clusters of packages? James Fairbanks
