Hi Tilman,
Apologies that it’s taken some time to get back to you.
We had initially published these numbers as part of Katherine’s announcement on our website https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/02/04/wikimedia-foundation-ceo-katherine-maher-to-step-down-in-april-2021/ that she was stepping down. After you emailed, we went back through our data sources and discovered an error: the growth in engagement came from sources that used different definitions and filters. For 2015, only Wikipedias were included in the totals for pageviews[1] and active editors[2]; however, for 2020, our data included pageviews and active editors across all Wikimedia sites[3]. When we corrected for this error as well as an error related to data normalization, we saw that pageviews increased 24 percent (not 30 percent) over that time period[3,4], and active editors increased 18 percent, not 36 percent[3,5].
We have issued a correction for the website. Thank you for flagging this so that we were able to catch and correct this error!
Warm regards,
Kate
[1] December 2015 pageview data from https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm
[2] December 2015 active editor data from https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
[3] December 2020 content interactions and active editor data from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:December_2020_Wikimedia_movement_met...
[4] December 2015 pageview data from https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjectsOriginal.htm
[5] December 2015 active editor data from an internal query across all Wikimedia sites, showing 79,420 active editors
--
Kate Zimmerman (she/they) Director of Data Science, Product Analytics Wikimedia Foundation
On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 1:56 AM Tilman Bayer haebwiki@gmail.com wrote:
In her recent announcement of her upcoming departure as the Wikimedia Foundation's CEO, Katherine highlighted a growth in "reader engagement" by 30% during her tenure (i.e. since 2016).[1] A WMF board member since reported in somewhat more detail that this refers to "~1 billion interactions up 32% in six years".[2] Are the underlying numbers published somewhere?
Regards, Tilman
[1] https://twitter.com/krmaher/status/1357390962410987520 [2] https://twitter.com/raju/status/1371100758343614471
PS: As some may be aware, a widely read German blogger linked to Katherine's tweet while singling out the "reader engagement" bit for some outspoken criticism. Just to clarify, that's not why I'm asking (in fact I disagree with most of that criticism).
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics