Erik's proposal sounds very reasonable.

There might be some confusion about what we mean by "keeping the old datasets for longitudinal analysis". No one is planning to remove the old static dumps, just stop generating them/maintaining them going forward. 

I also want to echo Nuria regarding the human cost of maintaining multiple definitions. I just finished preparing a response to a reporter who was asking about project-level mobile PV data and I was not immediately able to answer if a specific data source I wanted to cite was using the old or new definition (until I talked to Dan and we looked up together a gerrit patch).  

How do people feel about turning off the generation of old dumps by May 2016, i.e. one year after having the two series of data available in parallel?



On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 10:17 AM, Nuria Ruiz <nuria@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>As I just mentioned to Dan in a private email conversation, keeping datasets even with imperfect measurements is important. Particularly for longitudinal analysis.
Have in mind that maintaining these old dumps is not "free", it causes a lot of confusion and maintenance costs to have several pageview definitions around. We get a lot of questions about spiky-ness of old definition and we need to maintain software that generates the old files thus, we think is reasonable to ask our users to transition to the new definition and eventually (in a period of months) turn off the old dumps. 

On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 6:12 AM, Maurice Vergeer <m.vergeer@maw.ru.nl> wrote:
Dear all,

As I just mentioned to Dan in a private email conversation, keeping datasets even with imperfect measurements is important. Particularly for longitudinal analysis.

Also, from what I understand - me being a newby here - is that the data are stored in separate files. Dan suggested reordering the page into categories. Maybe, another option is to create more extensive datasets with more different measurements in a single datafile. On the other hand, the files would become even bigger in size. Not an issue for mee, but for users in the field accesibility (dowlnload bandwidth) could become an issue.

my two cents
Maurice


On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Alex Druk <alex.druk@gmail.com> wrote:
Nothing against this approach!

On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org> wrote:


On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Alex Druk <alex.druk@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Dan,
Happy holidays!
Good idea to combine these datasets! However we have one more dataset by Erik Zachte : http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/

And that's an important one!  But I was thinking we could re-organize the page into categories.  Erik's dataset could go into a "processed data" category or something like that.  The three I wanted to talk about on this thread are just the raw data. 

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Thank you.

Alex Druk
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To see my publications, see http://mauricevergeer.nl/node/1
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