With more ways of viewing content, it is going to get harder and harder to
maintain a pattern based definition. Indeed, we want to move away from pattern based definition as mach as possible.
This is an FYI to everyone that with our latest changes (that we are in the process of deploying today) if a request comes "tagged" with "preview" in the x-analytics header it will not be counted towards a pageviews. The Android App should do corresponding changes to add the tag "preview" to its preview requests.
X-analytics header is documented here: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/X-Analytics
On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 7:19 AM, Andrew Otto aotto@wikimedia.org wrote:
If we /do/ include RESTBase requests we will not only have to rewrite the pageview definition for the apps to recognise the new URL scheme
I really think that apps and APIs should do something proactive to tag or log a pageview. With more ways of viewing content, it is going to get harder and harder to maintain a pattern based definition. A pageview should be an event that is logged, not something that is pattern matched out of a very noisy stream of data.
Most mediawiki requests do this now, via the page_id field in the X-Analytlics header, but we can’t use this for all pageviews because APIs are more complicated (e.g. more than one page can be served in a single request, etc.). In the longterm, there should be a pageview event stream just like rcstream! :)
-Ao
On Aug 18, 2015, at 19:58, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 18 August 2015 at 19:11, Bernd Sitzmann bernd@wikimedia.org wrote:
This discussion is about needed updates of the definition and Analytics implementation for mobile apps page view metrics. There is also an associated Phab task[4]. Please add the proper Analytics project there.
Background / Changes
As you probably remember, the Android app splits a page view into two requests: one for the lead section and metadata, plus another one for
the
remainder.
The mobile apps are going to change the way they load pages in two
different
ways:
We'll add a link preview when someone clicks on a link from a page. We're planning on switching over the using RESTBase for loading pages
and
also the link preview (initially just the Android beta, ater more)
Woah woah woah woah woah. By RESTBase do you mean Gabriel's RESTful
service API?
Last time I checked that wasn't even consumed by HDFS. Is it now being consumed by HDFS?
More importantly the actual URLs are going to look /totally/ different. If we do not include RESTBase requests, we will miss the apps. If we /do/ include RESTBase requests we will not only have to rewrite the pageview definition for the apps to recognise the new URL scheme, we will also potentially have to rewrite every /other/ bit of the definition to /not/ incorporate those requests.
(I use "we" in a collective sense. This isn't my baby any more, although if Joseph et al want help with the refactor here I'm happy to spend my volunteer time on it).
But basically every other bit of your email is important but now secondary: this is a potentially massive change, all on its own, even without the link preview, even if the substance of the requests going to RESTBase were identical.
This will have implications for the pageviews definition and how we
count
user engagement.
The big question is
Should we count link previews as a page view since it's an indication of user engagement? Or should there be a separate metric for link previews?
Counting page views
IIRC we currently count action=mobileview§ions=0 query parameters of api.php as a page view. When we publish link previews for all Android
app
users then we would either want to count also the calls to action=query&prop=extracts as a page view or add them to another metric.
Once the apps use RESTBase the HTTPS requests will be very different:
Page view: Instead of action=mobileview§ions=0 the app would call
the
RESTBase endpoint for lead request[1] instead of the PHP API mentioned above. Then it would call [2]. Link preview: Instead of action=query&prop=extracts it would call the
lead
request[1], too, since there is a lot of overlap. At least that our
current
plan. The advantage of that is that the client doesn't need to execute
the
lead request a second time if the user clicks on the link preview (--
either
through caching or app logic.)
So, in the RESTBase case we either want to count the mobile-html-sections-lead requests or the mobile-html-sections-remaining requests depending on what our definition for page views actually is. We could also add a query parameter or extra HTTP header to one of the mobile-html-sections-lead requests if we need to distinguish between previews and page views.
Both the current PHP API and the RESTBase based metrics would need to be compatible and be collected in parallel since we cannot control when
users
update their apps.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html-sections-lead/Dilbert
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/mobile-html-sections-remaining/Dil...
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Team/RESTBase_services_for_app...
[4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109383
Cheers,
Bernd
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