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_edit.dewiki.svg

[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?