Hi Toby, Everyone,

thanks for this update. I think the approach you describe, boosting stats.grok.se with hardware support while developing the "official", scalable WMF solution, is quite sensible in this situation.

I do understand having just too many things on your plate to deal with, and I also know the difficulties inherent to dealing with large amounts of data in a scalable fashion. No one expects you to "press a button" and view data appears as if by magic; dedicated developer time, steady progress with the occasional update, support of Henrik's current interim solution, and maybe some rough time estimates for milestones would be what I (and people from the GLAM community) would hope for.

Thanks,
Magnus

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 11:14 PM, Toby Negrin <tnegrin@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Everyone,

Many of you have read Magnus' post on his blog. 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 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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