I'm checking with people in ops, but we're planning to add a well defined parameter to the end of URLs to see the level of clickthroughs on such links. For example:

(If there are existing params on the URL - not an issue so far that I know of for the apps as they canonicalize the title and URL - then the param would be last in the ampersand separated query string parameter.)

And then we'd use Varnish to remove the parameter to reduce the risk of cache fragmentation.

We "know" this is probably only a short term solution, and as a follow up from the meeting with the people on the CC line, I'm emailing to open the discussion on options for a more generic option.

So far I think there are a few options from what we've discussed, if we're to support additional bucketing.

(1) More parameters (e.g., ?analytics=ios_share_a_fact&version=1)

Downside: potentially harder to standardize and remove things from the URL

(2) More conventional provenance (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Castle&oldid=645632619/ref=_wref_source%3Dapp<...more provenance info as desired>/).

Downside: technically speaking, may break the schema of well-formed titles

(3) Rely upon (1) or (2), or perhaps an even more RESTful shortlinker (it could have features like target - web or w:// wor wiki:// protocol or whatever - versioning, etc.).

Downside: maybe a little more work to stand up service. As we recalled, there's an extension out there that may, perhaps with some tweaks, fit the build.

-Adam