Like Nuria said: this is unique devices, not unique people. Many people in the Global North use more than one device to access Wikipedia (desktop, tablet, phone).
Also I'd like to add a caveat: any long term change will have to factor in that this ratio of devices owned per user isn't fixed over time.
Erik Zachte
-----Original Message----- From: Wikitech-l [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gergo Tisza Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 22:54 To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. Cc: Wikimedia developers; Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Analytics] Unique Devices data available on API
Very interesting, thank you!
Do you have any estimate of how much this overcounts? I checked the monthly uniques for huwiki https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/hu.wikipedia.org/all-sites/monthly/20160301/20160331, and it's about 5.8 million, which is a bit higher than the total number of internet users in Hungary (estimated to 5.2 million). This Gemius analyis http://www.gemius.com/all-reader-news/is-wikipedia-still-popular.html from a year ago claims a 30% reach for Wikipedia, which would be about 1.5 million. They use a software panel (a demographically representative group of volunteers who installed tracking software) so they might be inaccurate (and they only count traffic originating from Hungary I think) but probably not by a factor of four.
On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Nuria Ruiz nuria@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello!
The analytics team is happy to announce that the Unique Devices data is now available to be queried programmatically via an API.
This means that getting the daily number of unique devices [1] for English Wikipedia for the month of February 2016, for all sites (desktop and mobile) is as easy as launching this query:
https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/en.wikipedia. org/all-sites/daily/20160201/20160229
You can get started by taking a look at our docs: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Unique_Devices#Quick_Sta rt
If you are not familiar with the Unique Devices data the main thing you need to know is that is a good proxy metric to measure Unique Users, more info below.
Since 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation used comScore to report data about unique web visitors. In January 2016, however, we decided to stop reporting comScore numbers [2] because of certain limitations in the methodology, these limitations translated into misreported mobile usage. We are now ready to replace comscore numbers with the Unique Devices Dataset . While unique devices does not equal unique visitors, it is a good proxy for that metric, meaning that a major increase in the number of unique devices is likely to come from an increase in distinct users. We understand that counting uniques raises fairly big privacy concerns and we use a very private conscious way to count unique devices, it does not include any cookie by which your browser history can be tracked [3].
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices [2] [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#How_do_we_coun t_unique_ devices.3F
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
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