[Wikitech-l] Readership metrics for the fortnight until December 6, 2015

[Tilman Bayer]

Hi all,

here is the usual look at our most important readership metrics. This time
examining, among other things, pageview changes in various countries, such
as the effect of a brief block in China and of the sudden popularity of a
Greek expression derived from Latin. The Android has been seeing a
prolonged decrease in downloads, which fortunately were offset recently by
a more positive development.

With this issue we are changing the scope of this report from a timespan of
one week to two weeks (a fortnight
) or four weeks, see further
remarks below. Most of the metrics here are now being updated weekly on the new
Product page .

Before we go to the usual data, a note (for those who haven’t seen it yet)
that Wikistats  has now been upgraded to the
new pageview definition, see the announcement

by Erik Zachte.

(All numbers below are averages for November 23-December 6, 2015 unless
otherwise noted.)

Pageviews

Total:  527 million/day (-2.4% from the previous fortnight)

Context (April 2015-December 2015):

(see also the Vital Signs dashboard
)

A notable weekly drop of -2.2% in the week until November 29, followed by
another -0.2% in the week until December 6.

Desktop: 56.6% ​(week until Nov 22: ​57.2%)

Mobile web: 42.2% ​(week until Nov 22: 41.6%)

Apps: 1.2% ​(week until Nov 22: ​1.2%)

Context (April 2015-December 2015):



Global North ratio: 77.6% of total pageviews (week until Nov 22: 77.3%)

Context (April 2015-December 2015):



Out of curiosity about the -2.2% drop, I ran a query for the week until
November 29 to find the countries with the largest changes from the
previous week (as in some

previous reports; restricted to those with >1 millions views/day in the
week until Nov 29):

Greece +21.6% 2.3 m/day

South Africa -21.6% 1.2 m/day

Ireland   -20.6% 2.3 m/day

Colombia -15.7% 3.3 m/day

Venezuela -10.9% 2.3 m/day

Argentina -8.3% 4.9 m/day

Philippines -8.3% 3.5 m/day

New Zealand -7.3% 1.3 m/day

Vietnam -7.1% 2.1 m/day

Taiwan -6.9% 6.2 m/day

For the top three, I looked at how pageviews developed on a daily basis
during the last three month including the week after this large change
(until Dec 6):

In Greece, the +21.6% rise was the result of an isolated spike from
November 23-25. This can be traced to a single page on the Greek Wiktionary
which on most days before and after only saw a single-digit number of
pageviews, but on these three days received more than 2.8 million: τάλε
κουάλε
.
It’s about an expression that apparently comes from Latin via Italian
(“tale quale”)  and means
something like “exactly the same” or “spitting image”. From the form of the
spike, it was likely not the result of actual human interest, rather an
undetected bot trying to learn exactly the same about exactly the same.


In Ireland, the -20.6% drop marked the end of a plateau whose start had
actually shown up in the report for the week until November 1

already, where the country was the top changer with a 40.2% rise.

For South Africa, the -20.6% drop does not form part of a clear pattern.

Turning to the week until December 6, there were user reports

starting around December 4 that Wikimedia projects were being blocked in
China on desktop more widely than before (the Chinese Wikipedia has been
blocked since May 2015). However, as can be seen in the chart below, the
block appears to have been short-lived. It has also been mentioned in
various media reports (English-language examples: China Digital Times
,
TIME
).

New app installations

Android: 30.6k/day (-28.9% from the previous fortnight)

Daily installs per device, from Google Play

Context (last two months):

Instead of recovering to the level from before the App Store feature from
Nov 5-12, installation numbers dropped further until early December. It now
appears that this is conn

[Wikitech-l] IRC office hours: Shared hosting

[Gilles Dubuc]

As part of T113210 [1], which is a broader discussion on track for the
developer summit, I am hosting two IRC office hours back to back [2] on
December 21st from 20:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC.

The previous office hour [3] focused on ways to reconnect to the shared
hosting community. This time two very different topics will be discussed.

*The open questions in the descriptions below are by no means meant to be
exhaustive, nor are they expected to be fully answered by the end of those
office hours. They are just examples to clarify the context of the titles.*

*Shared hosting technical alternatives*

During the last office hour on the topic of non-technical mediawiki
installs, people seemed very eager to discuss new technical solutions that
could offer a viable alternative to shared hosting.

Could new technologies like containers allow for performance/cost ratios
comparable to shared hosting? If not, how big would the penalty be? How
much maintenance would we have to do to keep deployment on such platforms
up to date?

Shared hosting has always suffered from the fact that it's not used at the
WMF and therefore only maintained on a volunteer basis. How would things be
different with new tech?

*Shared hosting support definition*

Shared hosting usage is already a reality and we should do a better job
accounting for it. Currently mediawiki contributors have no visibility in
what should be supported and to what degree. Our browser support is graded
and very clear, meanwhile our server-side support is not:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility

Should we model our server-side compatibility guidelines on the graded
system we have for browsers? If so, what would that look like? How could we
break down "shared hosting support" into more discreet server-side
capabilities?


[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113210
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
[3]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.2015-11-19-19.00.html
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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours: Shared hosting

[James Salsman]

Hi Giles,

I regret I will probably not be available for the IRC office hours as scheduled.

In the discussion of shared hosting, I worry that en:User:Dispenser's
reflinks project, which requires a 20 TB cache, is being forgotten
again. He tried to host it himself, but it's offline again. This data
is essential in maintaining an audit trail of references as long as
the Internet Archive respects robots.txt retroactively, allowing those
who inherit domains to censor them, even if they have already been
used as a reference in Wikipedia. Keeping the cache is absolutely a
fair use right in the US, in both statutory and case law, and it is
essential to be able to track down patterns of attempts at deceptive
editing to address quality concerns around deliberately biased editing
such as paid editing. Because of the sensitivity of this goal, the
Foundation should certainly bear the risk of hosting the reflinks
cache. However, in the past, 20 TB was considered excessive, even
though the cost was shown to be less than $5000 without whatever Dell
NSA-enabled hardware you usually buy.

Would you please reach out to en:User:Dispenser and offer them the
20TB hosting solution they need for the Foundation to bear the risk of
the reflinks cache?  Thank you for your kind consideration.

Best regards,
Jim

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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wikimedia-l] IRC office hours: Shared hosting

[Max Semenik]

James, your message is absolutely an offtopic in this thread aboud shared
hosting of MediaWiki installations by third parties. Could you raise your
concerns in a separate thread, not aiming them at Gilles who is completely
unable to help you as he's simply doing different stuff at the foundation?

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 6:51 PM, James Salsman  wrote:

> Hi Giles,
>
> I regret I will probably not be available for the IRC office hours as
> scheduled.
>
> In the discussion of shared hosting, I worry that en:User:Dispenser's
> reflinks project, which requires a 20 TB cache, is being forgotten
> again. He tried to host it himself, but it's offline again. This data
> is essential in maintaining an audit trail of references as long as
> the Internet Archive respects robots.txt retroactively, allowing those
> who inherit domains to censor them, even if they have already been
> used as a reference in Wikipedia. Keeping the cache is absolutely a
> fair use right in the US, in both statutory and case law, and it is
> essential to be able to track down patterns of attempts at deceptive
> editing to address quality concerns around deliberately biased editing
> such as paid editing. Because of the sensitivity of this goal, the
> Foundation should certainly bear the risk of hosting the reflinks
> cache. However, in the past, 20 TB was considered excessive, even
> though the cost was shown to be less than $5000 without whatever Dell
> NSA-enabled hardware you usually buy.
>
> Would you please reach out to en:User:Dispenser and offer them the
> 20TB hosting solution they need for the Foundation to bear the risk of
> the reflinks cache?  Thank you for your kind consideration.
>
> Best regards,
> Jim
>
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>



-- 
Best regards,
Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])
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[Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Usage Report 2015

[Mark A. Hershberger]

The MediaWiki Stakeholders' User Group wants to improve MediaWiki and advocates 
the needs of MediaWiki users outside Wikimedia Foundation-supported projects. 




But who is using MediaWiki? In an effort to answer this question the MediaWiki 
Stakeholders’ Group organized a survey during the summer of 2015 and asked 
people using MediaWiki to respond. The result is a sampling of over 100 
responses from people using MediaWiki around the world. The results were 
interesting. Folks from all sorts of communities and industries use MediaWiki - 
from organizations like NASA, The UK LGBT Archive, Society of Exploration 
Geophysicists, and more. 




Combined with some statistics we were able to obtain with help from individuals 
at the WMF, and the results of the survey we have completed our MediaWiki Usage 
Report for 2015 . This report provides insight into the various ways MediaWiki 
is being used - How people upgrade, what extensions are their "must have's", 
what they enjoy about the software, their concerns, and more. We encourage 
those using MediaWiki to have a look and provide any feedback or thoughts. 




If you'd like to know more about the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group, or to get 
involved, join us for one of our regular hangouts or leave a note on our talk 
page . MediaWiki Wishlist 


Combined with existing collaboration around request features and responses from 
one particular survey question, "What would you like to see most improved in 
MediaWiki the software?" we created a prioritized 'wishlist' of MediaWiki 
features . Our next project is figuring out how to implement these requests. 
See Also 


* A raw download of the survey results (anonymized of course) can be found 
on MediaWiki.org 
* If you were at our session at Wikimania 2015, this might sound familiar. 
There we shared preliminary results from the survey while we were still 
collecting responses. 
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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Usage Report 2015

[Brian Wolff]

On Monday, December 14, 2015, Mark A. Hershberger  wrote:
>
>
> The MediaWiki Stakeholders' User Group wants to improve MediaWiki and
advocates the needs of MediaWiki users outside Wikimedia
Foundation-supported projects.
>
>
>
>
> But who is using MediaWiki? In an effort to answer this question the
MediaWiki Stakeholders’ Group organized a survey during the summer of 2015
and asked people using MediaWiki to respond. The result is a sampling of
over 100 responses from people using MediaWiki around the world. The
results were interesting. Folks from all sorts of communities and
industries use MediaWiki - from organizations like NASA, The UK LGBT
Archive, Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and more.
>
>
>
>
> Combined with some statistics we were able to obtain with help from
individuals at the WMF, and the results of the survey we have completed our
MediaWiki Usage Report for 2015 . This report provides insight into the
various ways MediaWiki is being used - How people upgrade, what extensions
are their "must have's", what they enjoy about the software, their
concerns, and more. We encourage those using MediaWiki to have a look and
provide any feedback or thoughts.
>
>
>
>
> If you'd like to know more about the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group, or to
get involved, join us for one of our regular hangouts or leave a note on
our talk page . MediaWiki Wishlist
>
>
> Combined with existing collaboration around request features and
responses from one particular survey question, "What would you like to see
most improved in MediaWiki the software?" we created a prioritized
'wishlist' of MediaWiki features . Our next project is figuring out how to
implement these requests. See Also
>
>
> * A raw download of the survey results (anonymized of course) can be
found on MediaWiki.org
> * If you were at our session at Wikimania 2015, this might sound
familiar. There we shared preliminary results from the survey while we were
still collecting responses.
> ___
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Umm, where is the link to the report?
-
--bawolff
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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Usage Report 2015

[Mark A. Hershberger]

Brian Wolff  writes:

> Umm, where is the link to the report?

Dadgummit.  Stupid mailmain filtering out HTML mail.

I'll resend.  Sorry for the confusion.

Mark.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Usage Report 2015

[Mark A. Hershberger]

TL;DR: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Usage_Report_2015

The MediaWiki Stakeholders User Group[1] wants to improve MediaWiki and
advocates the needs of MediaWiki users outside Wikimedia
Foundation-supported projects.

But who is using MediaWiki? In an effort to answer this question the
MediaWiki Stakeholders’ Group organized a survey[2] during the summer of
2015 and asked people using MediaWiki to respond. The result is a
sampling of over 100 responses from people using MediaWiki around the
world. The results were interesting. Folks from all sorts of communities
and industries use MediaWiki - from organizations like NASA, The UK LGBT
Archive, Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and more.

Combined with some statistics we were able to obtain with help from
individuals at the WMF, and the results of the survey we have completed
our MediaWiki Usage Report for 2015.[3] This report provides insight into
the various ways MediaWiki is being used - How people upgrade, what
extensions are their "must have's", what they enjoy about the software,
their concerns, and more. We encourage those using MediaWiki to have a
look and provide any feedback or thoughts.

If you'd like to know more about the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group, or
to get involved, join us for one of our regular hangouts or leave a note
on our talk page.[4]

MediaWiki Wishlist

Combined with existing collaboration around request features and
responses from one particular survey question, "What would you like to
see most improved in MediaWiki the software?" we created a prioritized
'wishlist' of MediaWiki features.[5] Our next project is figuring out how
to implement these requests.

See Also

* A raw download of the survey results (anonymized of course) can be
  found on MediaWiki.org.[6]

* If you were at our session at Wikimania 2015, this might sound
  familiar. There we shared preliminary results[7] from the survey while we
  were still collecting responses.

Footnotes: 
[1]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group

[2]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2015_MediaWiki_User_Survey

[3]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Usage_Report_2015

[4]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group

[5]  
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group/Tasks/Feature_wishlist

[6]  
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2015_MediaWiki_User_Survey/Survey_Results_Anonymized.csv

[7]  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015_MediaWiki_User_Report.pdf


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Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki Usage Report 2015

[Brian Wolff]

On Monday, December 14, 2015, Mark A. Hershberger  wrote:
>
> TL;DR: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Usage_Report_2015
>
> The MediaWiki Stakeholders User Group[1] wants to improve MediaWiki and
> advocates the needs of MediaWiki users outside Wikimedia
> Foundation-supported projects.
>
> But who is using MediaWiki? In an effort to answer this question the
> MediaWiki Stakeholders’ Group organized a survey[2] during the summer of
> 2015 and asked people using MediaWiki to respond. The result is a
> sampling of over 100 responses from people using MediaWiki around the
> world. The results were interesting. Folks from all sorts of communities
> and industries use MediaWiki - from organizations like NASA, The UK LGBT
> Archive, Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and more.
>
> Combined with some statistics we were able to obtain with help from
> individuals at the WMF, and the results of the survey we have completed
> our MediaWiki Usage Report for 2015.[3] This report provides insight into
> the various ways MediaWiki is being used - How people upgrade, what
> extensions are their "must have's", what they enjoy about the software,
> their concerns, and more. We encourage those using MediaWiki to have a
> look and provide any feedback or thoughts.
>
> If you'd like to know more about the MediaWiki Stakeholders Group, or
> to get involved, join us for one of our regular hangouts or leave a note
> on our talk page.[4]
>
> MediaWiki Wishlist
>
> Combined with existing collaboration around request features and
> responses from one particular survey question, "What would you like to
> see most improved in MediaWiki the software?" we created a prioritized
> 'wishlist' of MediaWiki features.[5] Our next project is figuring out how
> to implement these requests.
>
> See Also
>
> * A raw download of the survey results (anonymized of course) can be
>   found on MediaWiki.org.[6]
>
> * If you were at our session at Wikimania 2015, this might sound
>   familiar. There we shared preliminary results[7] from the survey while
we
>   were still collecting responses.
>
> Footnotes:
> [1]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group
>
> [2]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2015_MediaWiki_User_Survey
>
> [3]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Usage_Report_2015
>
> [4]  https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group
>
> [5]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group/Tasks/Feature_wishlist
>
> [6]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2015_MediaWiki_User_Survey/Survey_Results_Anonymized.csv
>
> [7]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015_MediaWiki_User_Report.pdf
>
>
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Thanks for putting that together. The outcome is much more interesting than
I expected it would be when I first heard the idea of a user survey.

--
-bawolff
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[Wikitech-l] Interactive graphs & charts are now live

[Yuri Astrakhan]

The  tag has just been upgraded to Vega 2.0, adding interactivity
support.  See live examples here
.

Vega 1.0 is still available, but it is obsolete.  Please migrate all your
graphs to the new system so we can turn 1.0 off. See how to migrate:
https://github.com/vega/vega/wiki/Upgrading-to-2.0

Unless the graph definition contains a "version" value, the default is
still 1. After I tag all existing graphs, I will switch the default to
version 2.

See Vega main page for more: http://vega.github.io/vega/
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[Wikitech-l] Agenda bashing on Wednesday AND something to bash!

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone,

Quim and I met earlier, and we agreed to a main room schedule for WikiDev '16:



That maybe is overstating it a bit; we mainly decided on two things:
1.  Each of the working groups/areas defined in T119018 should have a
session in the main room (Robertson 1, which seats 200).  Discussion
of how we should use the focused time in each area should happen in
the working area Phab tasks.
2.  We scheduled a couple of main room sessions

Things we scheduled for the main room:
* Next Generation Content Loading and Routing (Adam Baso and Gabriel Wicke)
* How should Wikimedia software support non-Wikimedia deployments of
its software? (Gilles Dubuc)

We still have many open slots in the schedule to fill, but we now have
a little better idea of what those things will be competing against.
Barring a radical change the discussion or in our planning process
this week, what Quim and I plan to do is start filling in the slots in
the competing rooms (Robertson 2 and Robertson 3) from the must have
list (T119593).  We'll also be prodding the working areas to decide on
their plan for their Robertson 1 time at WikiDev.

Here's the list of working areas, and the current owner assigned to each:
T119022: Content format - Tim Starling
T119029: Content access and APIs - Gabriel Wicke
T119030: Collaboration - Quim Gil
T119032: Software engineering - Daniel Kinzler
T119162: User interface presentation - Volker Eckl

The agenda bashing session is planned for Wednesday, 2015-12-16, 22:00
UTC (2pm PST) on #wikimedia-office, during what is normally our RFC
meeting.

This email is largely a repeat of a couple of comments I made on Phab:


For many people (myself included), it's probably easier to read and
respond on Phab, but replies here are welcome as well.

Rob

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