On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 2:07 AM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 11/13/2013 07:14 PM, Arthur Richards wrote:

So why are those backend scripts stupid? Because they run every hour and
recalculate _all_ the values for every single graph. For example, even
though total unique editors for June 2013 will never change, they are
still recalculated every hour.

Is it really true that they will never change? I think many of the metrics are written such that when a page is deleted, it reduces edits in the past. So if I delete a page today (November 2013) that happened to be edited in June 2013, that affects the June 2013 edit counts.

That isn't intuitive anyway, but if there's a change in this regard, it needs to be communicated.

Yeah, we refer to that as deletion drift. Dario is heading an effort to make these metrics more standard and intuitive (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Refining_the_definition_of_monthly_active_editors). We'll have to see what we need for these dashboards and if the new definitions would help.