I will only answer for our discussions during the board meeting.
This goes two fold:
* we have many teams, including in tech and product, that are understaffed.
Without pointing at one specifically, I raised that at work I have team I
can compare to the Foundation's one, on the very same topic, that is 5 FTE
larger. Even though my company isn't, yet! :), as big as the projects are.
So we have to invest to catch up on some debt we may have.
* we need to evolve. The web and the way people access information and
learn have changed in the pas few years. Plus we the way people address
knowledge in the world is very diverse. We have need to work on that. To
fit new usages and cultural differences.
On one hand consolidating on the other hand evolving.
What it actually means, I can't answer yet. There will most probably be
more on that in the annual plan. But I hope the intent is clearer.
(And for the minutes thank Chuck who did an amazing work documenting our
meeting :))
Le 25 janv. 2018 09:14, "Anders Wennersten" <m...@anderswennersten.se> a
écrit :
> Many thanks, Tillman, for your reply and also Christophes. Your analysis
> shows there are factors effecting pageviews that needs a qualified analysis
> to get to understand the numbers .
>
> I am also happy to see that there are clever people looking into this, and
> I was also very glad to see, in the minutes from the Board meeting in
> November (coming out yesterday), that this negative trend was up on the
> table and discussed (twice?).
>
> On the other hand I am still concerned. Could it be that our readers is
> less interested in our project and/or looking for information from other
> sites? We have been used to a steady increase of page views, and even if
> there are technical reasons (as you put forward) for very much of the
> decline, I still interpret the figures that the fact is it its_not_
> increasing as it has been doing. And this even as our project is getting
> more substantiated and better quality content, and we still see a healthy
> big increase in many ("emerging") versions.
>
> The minutes from November meeting (with its very much expended
> content-thanks for that) talks of a general guideline of increasing
> employed personnel with 10-20% for the coming three years. Is this for
> getting our platform more competitive as users look elsewhere for answers?
> But to have the ambition to match the platforms for Google and Facebook
> must be futile would it not? Or are we being naive making big investment
> for expansion when our "market share" is decreasing (if this is the case),
> and where consolidation would be more appropriate?
>
> Would a proper market survey (of how our users look for info on the net
> and over time) be a thing to be made before committing to an expansionist
> three years plan?
>
> Anders
>
>
> Den 2018-01-25 kl. 07:57, skrev Tilman Bayer:
>
>> Hi Anders,
>>
>> some notes about possible reasons below. As a data analyst in the
>> Foundation's Readers department, I am tracking our overall pageview
>> numbers on a monthly basis, which we report to the WMF board alongside
>> other metrics about editor activity etc. (This is also publicly
>> available at [1], where this recent pageview decline had already been
>> remarked upon earlier. What's more, you can check this regularly
>> updated chart for a visual year-over-year comparison: [2] )
>>
>> There are probably multiple causes for this year-over-year decrease
>> observable during the last few months. We know about one of them for
>> certain: The recent rollout of "page previews"[3] to all but two
>> Wikipedia versions. This is a new software feature that shows an
>> excerpt from the linked article when the reader hovers their mouse
>> over a link. It is designed to save readers the effort of clicking
>> through certain links. So a decrease in pageviews was fully expected
>> and is to some extent actually evidence for the feature's success.
>> According to our A/B tests, this decrease is around 2-4% (of desktop
>> pageviews). We are on the other hand going to measure this new,
>> alternative form of reading Wikipedia (i.e. the number of previews
>> seen) just like we measure pageviews now; there is currently a
>> technical discussion about this on the Analytics-l mailing list. But
>> for now it is not yet reflected in our public traffic reports.
>>
>> Google-referred pageviews did indeed see a year-over-year decrease of
>> some percent since November (but not before) [4], although this may
>> still not explain the entire rest of the year-over-year change in
>> overall pageviews. Regarding Google's Knowledge Panel - i.e. their
>> Wikipedia extracts that you mentioned - a research paper published
>> last year [5] has confirmed that it indeed has a negative effect on
>> our pageviews (which had long been the topic of speculation without
>> much actual evidence). However, Google already introduced this feature
>> in 2012, so it has been around over half a decade now and can't be
>> responsible per se for any recent drops. One would need to look for
>> more recent changes made by Google. (They actually made a tweak to the
>> panels for a particular topic category in early November [6], but to
>> me it seems rather unlikely to have had a noticeable effect on our
>> overall Google referrals.)
>>
>> Likewise, the internet-wide multi-year trend towards mobile doesn't
>> really explain this recent trend in our total (desktop + mobile)
>> pageviews - as James already pointed out, just a year ago we were
>> actually seeing a year-over-year *growth* of several percent for an
>> extended time period.
>>
>> Generally, keep in mind that while page requests by bots and spiders
>> are generally filtered out, the pageview numbers still encompass a
>> smaller amount of other automated views and artefacts, which can also
>> be responsible for sizable changes. In the data reported to the board
>> [1] I apply various corrections to filter out some more of these. But
>> the numbers at stats.wikimedia.org still include them. For example, if
>> you had looked at the same year-over-year change last summer, you
>> would have encountered an even bigger year-over-year pageview drop
>> which however is almost entirely spurious: An issue found and
>> mitigated in July/August 2016 had artificially inflated desktop
>> traffic up to 30% during these two months. There is a Phabricator task
>> to correct this in the publicly available data [7], but it is still
>> open.
>>
>> Besides the monthly reports of core metrics at [1] which come with
>> brief observations about trends, we also publish a more in-depth slide
>> deck about readership core metrics once per quarter.[8] The next one
>> will come out in two weeks and I plan to do some further analysis
>> (e.g. check if the decrease was focused geographically) in preparation
>> for that; so perhaps we will know a bit more then.
>>
>>
>>
>> [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Audiences
>>
>> [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_pageviews_
>> year-over-year_comparison_(since_May_2013).png
>>
>> [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews
>>
>> [4] http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/#traffic_by_engine and
>> http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/#traffic_summary , select weekly
>> or monthly smoothing for easier comparison, but keep in mind the
>> default view includes bots/spiders
>>
>> [5] Connor McMahon, Isaac Johnson, Brent Hecht: "The Substantial
>> Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the
>> Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information
>> Technologies" https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index
>> .php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15623
>> . BTW we are still looking for someone to volunteer a summary or
>> review of this paper for the Wikimedia Research Newsletter/ Wikipedia
>> Signpost, so that more community members can learn about this research
>> - contact me in case you're interested.
>>
>> [6] https://9to5google.com/2017/11/08/google-search-knowledge-pa
>> nels-news-publications/
>>
>> [7] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T175870
>>
>> [8] Cf. last quarter's edition:
>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation
>> _Readers_metrics_Q1_2017-18_(Jul-Sep_2017).pdf
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 2:55 AM, Anders Wennersten
>> <m...@anderswennersten.se> wrote:
>>
>>> We are seeing a steady decrease of page views to our projects
>>> (Wikipedia). Nov-Dec-Jan it is decreasing in a rate of 5-10% (year-year),
>>> and for big languages like Japanese, Spanish close to 10%, or some months
>>> even more [1]
>>>
>>> Is there any insights of why this is so? Could it be that Google take
>>> over accesses with their ever better way of showing results direct (but
>>> then also with showing extracts of Wikipedia articles) .
>>>
>>> Or that our interface on mobiles is inferior so we miss accesses from
>>> mobiles (now being 54% of total). Or horror of horror that users look for
>>> facts on all new sites with fake news instead of Wikipedia?
>>>
>>> Anders
>>>
>>> [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
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