Analytics February 2014

analytics@lists.wikimedia.org

36 participants
21 discussions

Analytics Development Sprint Planning Update
by Toby Negrin 22 Feb '14

22 Feb '14

Hi all, We're going to start being more transparent with the community today about the work being done by the analytics development team. Today's update is a summary of our sprint planning that we did yesterday. Short background -- the development team works in 2 week sprints which usually start on Thursday and end on Tuesday. Wednesday is a day that can be used at the team member's discretion -- normal work can be done, but it's also a space for experimentation. Over the coming weeks, we'll share more information about our planning, showcasing and tools. You may be "surprised" at the relatively small amount of work we commit to at the onset of a sprint. This is for two reasons -- we are interrupted a lot and this makes it difficult for us to predict our output; and we are a new team and are still understanding our velocity. Of course if we finish our commitments early, we just grab another task off the top of the backlog and work on that. Our projects are documented in our Mediawiki prioritization<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Prioritization_Planning> page. The following tasks and features roll are all associated with a prioritized project. Here are the commitments for this sprint. Links are to Mingle, the agile planning tool that we use. Fundraising Visualization Syncup<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1449> Measuring ULSFO Site Performance<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1450> Here is the top of the backlog (that is the tasks that will be worked on if/when the above are finished) Productionize Wikimetrics<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1185> Update Wikimetrics Serialization<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1396> Calculate Mobile Browser Breakdown<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1227> Duplicate WIkipedia Zero Dashboard Creation on Hadoop<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1453> Run Scheduled Reports via Wikimetrics<https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1376> Please let me know if you have any questions. -Toby

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response to Magnus' post about page views
by Toby Negrin 20 Feb '14

20 Feb '14

Hi Everyone, Many of you have read Magnus' post on his blog<http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=173>. I've commented on his blog and I wanted to repost here and address Magnus' concerns directly. First of all, I'm sorry that we let Magnus and other folks down on the page view APIs -- we made some commitments late last year that we weren't able to meet. Not only that, these failures echoed previous points of frustration with the Foundation. I do want to note that we actively support the infrastructure that feeds data to stats.grok.se. We've fixed a number of issues with that pipeline, most recently last week. We understand the importance of this data to the community. The page view API project has been challenging for a number of reasons -- the size of the data, the fact that definitions of page views have not been updated to stay in line with the changing traffic (mobile, bots, API requests, etc) and the challenges in aggregating various aliases. We've needed to revisit our definitions of page views in order to get this right as well as design and build a global architecture for collecting these and other metrics. In addition, we've tried to do this with a perspective of privacy and respect for our users. To this end, we presented an approach to measuring page views in MediaWiki at FOSDEM in January and have made progress towards our new infrastructure by deploying middleware delivering unsampled page view data from mobile devices from our globally distributed datacenters to our compute cluster for analysis. However, these initiatives are complex and will take several months to complete at the earliest. In the meantime, we're working with Henrik to scale up stats.grok.se. I also want to call out that the Analytics team has been supporting a wide range of users and stakeholders during the year. We've developed WikiMetrics, a tool for measuring editor productivity that is used by WMF program evaluation and community members; provided dashboards and support for Wikipedia Zero, our program to partner with our mobile partners to enable mobile Wikipedia access free from data charges; and supported product teams and researchers both inside and outside of the foundation. We've been prioritizing and working on these projects as our resources allow and it's important to understand that the team has not been idle. While we've done a less than stellar job in communicating our progress to the community, information on what we've been doing is available via our planning pages <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Prioritization_Planning> on mediawiki. In the future, we will be more proactive in communicating with the community regarding our goals and projects. -Toby

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Minor changes to R&D trello board
by Dario Taraborelli 14 Feb '14

14 Feb '14

I moved all coordination cards (think of them as “epics” or collections of tasks, with checklists pointing to individual cards) to a dedicated list: this should make it easier to follow what we’re working on. Also, if you update a card, please move it to the top of the list (wondering if there’s an automatic way to do so). Dario

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Recovering server-side events
by Dario Taraborelli 14 Feb '14

14 Feb '14

The issue with missing server-side EventLogging events [1] has been resolved and data recovery from the raw logs into the log DB (i.e. the source used to populate most dashboards) is currently underway. It will take approximately 4 days to restore the complete logs. Many thanks to Ori for helping with this. Dario [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60550

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User registration date on DB replicas
by Felipe Ortega 14 Feb '14

14 Feb '14

Hello all. I'm CCing the analytics list in case this question is also relevant for them. Not sure about research-l, so please forward this message if that's the case. I have a question regarding the registration date for new user accounts (table user). The information is (apparently) public, as it can be retrieved from the Special:ListUsers: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AListUsers&username=DarT… Furthermore, Dario uploaded to DataHub a CSV file with an hourly series of registration dates in 2008-2011, from enwiki: http://datahub.io/dataset/wikipedia-new-user-registrations It would be quite interesting to study the whole series (say, back to 2004) and compare it with other languages. However, this info is not available on the DB replicas in Tool-Labs (whole column 'user_registration' in table 'user' is NULL). My question is: are there any reasons for redacting this (apparently public) info? I can't figure out why this could be sensitive data. Thanks in advance, best regards. Felipe.

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January 2013 R&D monthly report
by Dario Taraborelli 10 Feb '14

10 Feb '14

Hey folks, it’s that time of the month. Please review and add anything worth reporting http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/RD201401 As usual, we are not including minor internal items. I’m planning to post this by EOD PT today. Dario

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Welcome Leila Zia to the Analytics Team
by Toby Negrin 10 Feb '14

10 Feb '14

Hi Everyone, I'd like to introduce Leila Zia, a Research Scientist, to the Analytics Team. We're really excited about bringing Leila's skills and expertise to the Foundation! In her own words: Leila Zia's areas of expertise are data mining, linear and non-linear optimization, dynamic programming, queueing theory, and game theory. She holds a PhD degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, a MSc degree from Rutgers University, and a BSc degree from Sharif University of Technology. Leila's past research has focused on predictive modeling and optimization in two healthcare applications, namely, appointment non-attendance and colorectal cancer mortality. She is excited to apply her research skills to Wikipedia-related questions. Leila can be contacted at leila(a)wikimedia.org. She'll be working out of the San Francisco office -- Welcome Leila! -Toby

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Metadata on deleted pages on labs
by Dario Taraborelli 10 Feb '14

10 Feb '14

Quick heads that the replication of metadata on deleted pages to labs is now completed. Thanks Sean and everybody else who helped make this happen! Dario https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49088 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49189

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Tracking page creations, moves, and deletions
by Steven Walling 10 Feb '14

10 Feb '14

Hi all, On the Growth team, we (and by we, I mean Aaron Halfaker) have been doing a great deal of work to understand trends in new article creation,[1] particularly from the new user perspective. Along with this and our launch of the new Draft namespace, we've discovered that our current data sources for tracking page creations, moves, and deletions are far too slow and awkward to use on a daily or weekly basis. To solve this problem and answer on-going questions about how many page creators there are, how successful they are, and what workflows they use, we've created three new schemas: - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:PageCreation - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:PageDeletion - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:PageMove We envision using similar to how we're using schemas like Schema:ServerSideAccountCreation and Schema:PrefUpdate. We will likely be implementing these in our team's next sprint, starting on February 5th, so if you have feedback please speak up soon. :) 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_article_creation -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Limn graph automation
by Jon Robson 03 Feb '14

03 Feb '14

I was a bit irritated yesterday to learn that we can automate the creation of Limn graphs and speed up the process. I had become so tired of manually copying and pasting existing graphs and manually editing them to work for a new graph that I knocked up a script to do this for me. The script simply took an SQL query and the config file and generates all the necessary JSON files for it so that it shows up on the Limn dashboard. With this script I was able to generate 5 graphs in the time it takes me to generate 1. However since uploading the script [1] I have now learnt other scripts like this exist. Please can we standardise on a way to generate these graphs (either locally or on the server) and detail it in the README to make this whole process of graph generation nicer for everyone involved? I've added some graphs (which should update soon) that show activity in the left navigation menu, on the watchlist page and on the diff page. We had this data so it seemed silly not to display it somewhere. When the data becomes available you'll notice that interestingly 'Home' link in the main menu is our most widely used feature. It will be great to see how that changes when search becomes available on special pages. Likewise random is a very widely used feature - we should continue experimenting with that and try and use it to engage new editors. [1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/110271/2/generate-graph.py [2] http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/#other-graphs-tab

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Analytics February 2014