On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
A metric that is based on a draft RfC that was only created this year and depends on JS? I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it has problems of its own ;p
On 3 December 2015 at 14:22, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
I have witnessed this discussion about what constitutes a page view repeatedly over the last months, and suspect that it is only going to get murkier the more interactive and non-navigation features we add. Some of these decisions are somewhat arbitrary, making the page view metric a less accurate indicator for the true engagement of users with our site.
I think we should complement pageviews with a new metric that side-steps a binary 1/0 decision: Time on Site. I have written up some thoughts on this at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119352.
To be fair, WMF went from Zero to Pageview in 11.4 years, so I think we can cut new metrics some slack. Gabriel, I agree that if we want to keep measuring things [2], we should get better at measuring things. But this process of picking metrics is pretty hard. A good researcher picks a phenomenon, measures it in different ways, conducts controlled experiments, and then decides what measure tracks that phenomenon best. You can see examples of Aaron doing this [1].
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_metrics.monthly_editor_counts.1... [2] personally I'm like, why are we measuring all these things? Do we actually take actions that result in real value based on these measures?