Cross-posting to research and analytics, too! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 6 May 2015 at 13:11 Subject: Traffic to the portal from Zero providers To: wikimedia-search(a)lists.wikimedia.org Hey all, (Throwing this to the public list, because transparency is Good) I recently did a presentation on a traffic analysis to the Wikipedia "home page" - www.wikipedia.org.[1] One of the biggest visualisations, in impact terms, showed that a lot of portal traffic - far more, proportionately, than traffic to Wikipedia overall - is coming from India and Brazil.[2] One of the hypotheses was that this could be Zero traffic. I've done a basic analysis of the traffic, looking specifically at the zero headers,[3] and this hypothesis turns out to be incorrect - almost no zero traffic is hitting the portal. The traffic we're seeing from Brazil and India is not zero-based. This makes a lot of sense (the reason mobile traffic redirects to the enwiki home page from the portal is the Zero extension, so presumably this happens specifically to Zero traffic) but it does mean that our null hypothesis - that this traffic is down to ISP-level or device-level design choices and links - is more likely to be correct. [1] http://ironholds.org/misc/homepage_presentation.html [2] http://ironholds.org/misc/homepage_presentation.html#/11 [3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98076 -- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation -- Oliver Keyes Research Analyst Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Mark J. Nelson <mjn(a)anadrome.org> wrote: Stuart A. Yeates <syeates(a)gmail.com> writes: > Reading that excellent presentation, the thought that struck me was: > > "If I wanted to subvert the assumption that Wikipedia == en.wiki, > linking to http://www.wikipedia.org/ is what I'd do." > > A smarter http://www.wikipedia.org/ might guess geo-location and thus > local languages. I'd also like to see something smarter done at the main page, but the "and thus" bit here is notoriously tricky. For example most geolocation-based things, like Wikidata by default, tend to produce funny results in Denmark. A Copenhagener is offered something like this choice, in order: * Danish, Greelandic, Faroese, Swedish, German, ... The reasoning here is that Danish, Greenlandic, and Faroese are official languages of the Danish Realm, which includes both Denmark proper, and two autonomous territories, Greeland and the Faroe Islands. And then Sweden and Germany are the two neighboring countries. But for the average Copenhagener, the following order is far more likely: * Danish, English, Norwegian Bokmål, ... The reason here is that Norwegian Bokmål is very close to Danish in written form (more than Swedish is, and especially more than Faroese is) while English is a widely used semi-official language in business, government, and education (for example about half of university theses are now written in English, and several major companies use it as their official workplace language). I think it's possible to come up with something that better aligns with readers' actual preferences, but it's not easy! -Mark -- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.kmjn.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

On 7 May 2015, at 05:06, Sam Katz <smkatz(a)gmail.com> wrote: hey guys, you can't guess geolocation, because occasionally you'd be wrong. this happens to me all the time. I want to read a site in spanish... and then it thinks I'm in Latin America, when I'm not. --Sam > On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> > wrote: > Possibly. But that sounds potentially wooly and sometimes inaccurate. > > When a browser makes a web request, it sends a header called the > accept_language header > > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields#Accept-Language) > which indicates what languages the browser finds ideal - i.e., what > languages the user and system are using. > > If we're going to make modifications here (I hope we will. But again; > early days) I don't see a good argument for using geolocation, which > is, as you've noted, flawed without substantial time and energy being > applied to map those countries to "probable" languages. The data the > browser already sends to the server contains the /certain/ languages. > We can just use that. > >> On 6 May 2015 at 22:50, Stuart A. Yeates <syeates(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> This seems like a great place to use analytics data, for each >> division >> in the geo-location classification, rank each of the languages by >> usage and present the top N as likely candidates (+ browser settings) >> when we need the user to pick a language. >> >> cheers >> stuart >> -- >> ...let us be heard from red core to black sky >> >> >>> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Mark J. Nelson <mjn(a)anadrome.org> >>> wrote: >>> >>> Stuart A. Yeates <syeates(a)gmail.com> writes: >>> >>>> Reading that excellent presentation, the thought that struck me >>>> was: >>>> >>>> "If I wanted to subvert the assumption that Wikipedia == en.wiki, >>>> linking to http://www.wikipedia.org/ is what I'd do." >>>> >>>> A smarter http://www.wikipedia.org/ might guess geo-location and >>>> thus >>>> local languages. >>> >>> I'd also like to see something smarter done at the main page, but >>> the >>> "and thus" bit here is notoriously tricky. >>> >>> For example most geolocation-based things, like Wikidata by default, >>> tend to produce funny results in Denmark. A Copenhagener is offered >>> something like this choice, in order: >>> >>> * Danish, Greelandic, Faroese, Swedish, German, ... >>> >>> The reasoning here is that Danish, Greenlandic, and Faroese are >>> official >>> languages of the Danish Realm, which includes both Denmark proper, >>> and >>> two autonomous territories, Greeland and the Faroe Islands. And then >>> Sweden and Germany are the two neighboring countries. >>> >>> But for the average Copenhagener, the following order is far more >>> likely: >>> >>> * Danish, English, Norwegian Bokmål, ... >>> >>> The reason here is that Norwegian Bokmål is very close to Danish in >>> written form (more than Swedish is, and especially more than Faroese >>> is) >>> while English is a widely used semi-official language in business, >>> government, and education (for example about half of university >>> theses >>> are now written in English, and several major companies use it as >>> their >>> official workplace language). >>> >>> I think it's possible to come up with something that better aligns >>> with >>> readers' actual preferences, but it's not easy! >>> >>> -Mark >>> >>> -- >>> Mark J. Nelson >>> Anadrome Research >>> http://www.kmjn.org >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Wiki-research-l mailing list >>> Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wiki-research-l mailing list >> Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > > > > -- > Oliver Keyes > Research Analyst > Wikimedia Foundation > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l