Today WMF Analytics announces a new product: a daily feed of media file request counts for all Wikimedia projects [1].

The counts are based on unsampled data, so any single request within the defined scope [2] will contribute to the counts.  

It can be seen as complimentary to our page view counts files [5].

The file layout is documented on wikitech [3].

Daily counts have been backfilled from January 1, 2015 onwards.

Additionally there is a daily zip file which contains a small subset of these raw counts: top 1000 most requested media files, one csv file for each column [7]. As these csv files have headers (not so easy to add in Hive) you may want to start with this file for a first impression (best open in spreadsheet program).  

The counts are collected from our Hadoop system, using a Hive query, with data markup done in UDF scripts. This feed hopefully addresses a long standing request, expressed often and by many, which we regrettably couldn't fulfil earlier, as our pre-Hadoop infrastructure and processing capacity were not up to the task.

An initial draft design (RFC) was presented last November at the Amsterdam Hackaton 2014 (GLAM and Wikidata).

Online consultation followed, leading to the current design [4].

This is a data feed with production status, but not the final release, as there is one major issue that hasn't been addressed yet (but progress is being made):

When using Media viewer to view images, some images are prefetched for better user experience, but these may never be shown to the user. Currently, those prefetched images are getting counted, as there is no way to detect whether an image was actually shown to the user or not.

Gilles Dubuc and other colleagues worked on a solution that would not hamper performance (a tough challenge) and would help us discern viewed from non-viewed files. A few days ago a patch was published! Adaptation of the Hive query will follow later. [6] Also, and related, context tagging isn't supported yet. [9]

Huge thanks to all people who contributed to the process so far, and still do.

Special thanks to Christian Aistleitner with whom I co-authored the design, and who also wrote the Hive implementation.

Erik Zachte

[1] http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/mediacounts/

[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Media_file_request_counts#Filtering

[3] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data/Mediacounts

[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Media_file_request_counts

[5] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data/Pagecounts-all-sites

(a new version of this data feed is in the works)

[6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89088

[7] Before you ask: no plans yet for further aggregation into monthly or yearly top ranking files. The current csv files are quick wins, using standard Linux tools.  

[8] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer

[9] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Media_file_request_counts#by_context