On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 6:51 PM, Aaron Halfaker <ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
One reason you may choose to record the a user_id in
the future is to
compare the flow for _new_ vs. _experienced_ editors/uploaders.
Experienced users are likely to have substantially different behavior as
they'll have had time to learn their way around UI quirks.
I was planning to use user_touched and/or user_editcount on server side to
determine a cohort and then pass that via the makeGlobalVariablesScript
hook to JS.
That could be inconvenient since we cannot analyze past data, but have to
wait for new data to be collected every time we define a now cohort. In my
experience with MediaViewer, though, almost all our data-driven decisions
were based on data which we collected with a specific purpose in mind. We
collected lots of data with an "it will probably be good for something"
mindset, and it turned out to be not so useful - whenever we wanted to use
it to answer some specific question, it turned out that there were some
small mistakes or inconsistencies which made it questionable, and which we
would have surely catched had we set up the data collection with that
specific question in mind. So I am not too worried about that.