Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia.* I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
* *"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."*
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
- Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and I have talked with you both about this directly - Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generallyhttp://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analytics-team/in Feb 2013 - Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular but neither of us do this with authenticated data - Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters - AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I think the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful. - Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia Foundation and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
We make the arguement in this paper here http://www.jmir.org/2011/1/e14/
James
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 12:52 PM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.comwrote:
Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia.* I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
*"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."*
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
- Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and I
have talked with you both about this directly
- Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generallyhttp://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analytics-team/in Feb 2013
- Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular but
neither of us do this with authenticated data
- Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the
Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters
- AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I think
the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful.
- Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia Foundation
and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out to us, you are definitely asking the questions in the right column. As Dario mentioned, we are working on pageview api which will eventually have support to query pageview counts for all pages belonging to category Foo. But that won't be operational before October 11 but I do want to see if we can help you nonetheless.
My advice would be the following:
1) Create an account on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page 2) Request access ( https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Tools_Access_Request) to be part of the tools-lab project -- this project offers access to redacted mirrors of the actual production mysql databases. 3) Run the following queries (I took Medicine as an example category)
Query 1: #Get all subcategories for category Medicine SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'subcat';
This will give you the result as can be found on https:/en/ wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine It gives a list of all the first-order child categories of the root category 'Medicine'. Now obviously you could traverse further down and get sub-sub categories etc but this is merely to illustrate a minimum approach. (Constructing a category graph is not entirely trivial as you have to consider potential loops).
Query 2: #Get all pages from category Medicine SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'page';
This query returns all the article titles and their namespace for pages that belong to the 'Medicine' category. This mirrors the second table from https:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine
Query 3: #Get all pages from category Medicine and it's subcategories SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN (SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to = 'Medicine' AND cl_type = 'subcat') AND cl_type = 'page' AND page.page_namespace = 0;
The final query basically combines query 1 and query 2 and get's a list of article titles that belong either to the category 'Medicine' or one of it's subcategories. I have attached a csv file with the results of that query. It contains 2809 article titles. I am sure the queries are not dealing with all the edge cases, can be refined etc. but my goal was to illustrate how to tackle your problem using existing tools that are available for all.
4) Finally, you would have to run a simple script and retrieve the pageview numbers for each of 2809 article titles from stats.grok.se (this you will have to do yourself but a combination of bash, wget and qs should do the trick or write a python / php / ruby script that does this for you).
That's all ;)
We do want to make this feature part of a more general purpose pageview api for which we are discussing the contours on this list. Please chime in with your use-cases!
I hope this will help you to get the data before October 11th.
Best,
Diederik
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.comwrote:
Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia.* I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
*"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."*
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
- Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and I
have talked with you both about this directly
- Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generallyhttp://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analytics-team/in Feb 2013
- Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular but
neither of us do this with authenticated data
- Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the
Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters
- AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I think
the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful.
- Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia Foundation
and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Hi Lane. I am working with Diederik on the pageviews API he mentioned, and your use case is one I care about a lot. Please please let us know what progress you've been making with the approach that Diederik mentioned, and if you get stuck people on this list can help. October 11th is my birthday and I don't like making people sad on my birthday.
Some things about the data stats.grok.se uses:
1. It does not include pageviews for the mobile versions of our projects, and this is pretty significant (like 20% if you want a rough and wildly inaccurate single number). You can take a look here to compare pageviews for mobile / non-mobile versions of our projects: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews_mobile, http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews. This past month, enwiki got 1.81B for mobile versions and 10.81B for non-mobile.
2. It does include redirects/renames as two pageviews (slight over-reporting)
3. It has a newly found 2% to 6% under-reporting problem: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54504
As we build our pageviews API we are going to solve all these problems and more, but not for our first release.
On Friday, October 4, 2013, Diederik van Liere wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out to us, you are definitely asking the questions in the right column. As Dario mentioned, we are working on pageview api which will eventually have support to query pageview counts for all pages belonging to category Foo. But that won't be operational before October 11 but I do want to see if we can help you nonetheless.
My advice would be the following:
- Create an account on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Request access (
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Tools_Access_Request) to be part of the tools-lab project -- this project offers access to redacted mirrors of the actual production mysql databases. 3) Run the following queries (I took Medicine as an example category)
Query 1: #Get all subcategories for category Medicine SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'subcat';
This will give you the result as can be found on https:/en/ wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine It gives a list of all the first-order child categories of the root category 'Medicine'. Now obviously you could traverse further down and get sub-sub categories etc but this is merely to illustrate a minimum approach. (Constructing a category graph is not entirely trivial as you have to consider potential loops).
Query 2: #Get all pages from category Medicine SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'page';
This query returns all the article titles and their namespace for pages that belong to the 'Medicine' category. This mirrors the second table from https:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine
Query 3: #Get all pages from category Medicine and it's subcategories SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN (SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to = 'Medicine' AND cl_type = 'subcat') AND cl_type = 'page' AND page.page_namespace = 0;
The final query basically combines query 1 and query 2 and get's a list of article titles that belong either to the category 'Medicine' or one of it's subcategories. I have attached a csv file with the results of that query. It contains 2809 article titles. I am sure the queries are not dealing with all the edge cases, can be refined etc. but my goal was to illustrate how to tackle your problem using existing tools that are available for all.
- Finally, you would have to run a simple script and retrieve the
pageview numbers for each of 2809 article titles from stats.grok.se (this you will have to do yourself but a combination of bash, wget and qs should do the trick or write a python / php / ruby script that does this for you).
That's all ;)
We do want to make this feature part of a more general purpose pageview api for which we are discussing the contours on this list. Please chime in with your use-cases!
I hope this will help you to get the data before October 11th.
Best,
Diederik
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.comwrote:
Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia.* I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
*"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."*
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
- Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and I
have talked with you both about this directly
- Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generallyhttp://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analytics-team/in Feb 2013
- Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular but
neither of us do this with authenticated data
- Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the
Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters
- AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I think
the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful.
- Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia Foundation
and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Thanks Diederik and Dan,
We at WikiProject Medicine already have some simple data based on grok.sereports. Unless the system you guys are sharing reports traffic greatly less than what grok.se shows, then I already have an idea of what I want to say. If I followed your instructions, got some numbers, and I drew a conclusion, would the analytics team and the Wikimedia Foundation be comfortable with whatever I said and validate my assertions? What if I said -
*"Judging by numbers of page views, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of health information on the Internet. Based on the available data, and assuming that page views indicate a choice in finding health information and that popularity is defined by what people choose most, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that Wikipedia has become the single most popular source of health information in the world."*
Is this strong enough? Is it too strong? Publishing a statement like this might be an invitation to the world to see if anyone can refute this. I am less interested in getting any particular kind of data than I am in identifying a statement that everyone in the Wikimedia movement can back.This is not going to be a technical article and it is preferable that I present no data at all - this article will be a feature in the magazine intended to present Wikipedia and start conversation. If anyone does have questions then I would like to anticipate them in advance and be able to prepare solid supporting evidence, and it would be nice to present data in response to requests for clarification. It might be that people with questions do not come to me at all - they may well contact the WMF and ask you guys to explain whatever I did. It does seem that the Wikimedia Foundation is competing with and perhaps out-performing organizations including NIH, the CDC, and the WHO in their own field of public health education outreach, so some people may have questions about what is happening here.
Since I feel like a simple statement like this has potential to influence the movement brand, I wanted to check in with you all. How do you guys feel about the statement I have written above? Would you be comfortable backing it? What would you want to see from me if I were to earn your support for making a statement like this?
If anyone has other interpretations of the available data or alternative proposals for some fundamental statement about the relative traffic to Wikipedia health content, then please share.
thanks,
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Hi Lane. I am working with Diederik on the pageviews API he mentioned, and your use case is one I care about a lot. Please please let us know what progress you've been making with the approach that Diederik mentioned, and if you get stuck people on this list can help. October 11th is my birthday and I don't like making people sad on my birthday.
Some things about the data stats.grok.se uses:
- It does not include pageviews for the mobile versions of our projects,
and this is pretty significant (like 20% if you want a rough and wildly inaccurate single number). You can take a look here to compare pageviews for mobile / non-mobile versions of our projects: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews_mobile, http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews. This past month, enwiki got 1.81B for mobile versions and 10.81B for non-mobile.
- It does include redirects/renames as two pageviews (slight
over-reporting)
- It has a newly found 2% to 6% under-reporting problem:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54504
As we build our pageviews API we are going to solve all these problems and more, but not for our first release.
On Friday, October 4, 2013, Diederik van Liere wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out to us, you are definitely asking the questions in the right column. As Dario mentioned, we are working on pageview api which will eventually have support to query pageview counts for all pages belonging to category Foo. But that won't be operational before October 11 but I do want to see if we can help you nonetheless.
My advice would be the following:
- Create an account on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Request access (
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Tools_Access_Request) to be part of the tools-lab project -- this project offers access to redacted mirrors of the actual production mysql databases. 3) Run the following queries (I took Medicine as an example category)
Query 1: #Get all subcategories for category Medicine SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'subcat';
This will give you the result as can be found on https:/en/ wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine It gives a list of all the first-order child categories of the root category 'Medicine'. Now obviously you could traverse further down and get sub-sub categories etc but this is merely to illustrate a minimum approach. (Constructing a category graph is not entirely trivial as you have to consider potential loops).
Query 2: #Get all pages from category Medicine SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'page';
This query returns all the article titles and their namespace for pages that belong to the 'Medicine' category. This mirrors the second table from https:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine
Query 3: #Get all pages from category Medicine and it's subcategories SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN (SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to = 'Medicine' AND cl_type = 'subcat') AND cl_type = 'page' AND page.page_namespace = 0;
The final query basically combines query 1 and query 2 and get's a list of article titles that belong either to the category 'Medicine' or one of it's subcategories. I have attached a csv file with the results of that query. It contains 2809 article titles. I am sure the queries are not dealing with all the edge cases, can be refined etc. but my goal was to illustrate how to tackle your problem using existing tools that are available for all.
- Finally, you would have to run a simple script and retrieve the
pageview numbers for each of 2809 article titles from stats.grok.se(this you will have to do yourself but a combination of bash, wget and qs should do the trick or write a python / php / ruby script that does this for you).
That's all ;)
We do want to make this feature part of a more general purpose pageview api for which we are discussing the contours on this list. Please chime in with your use-cases!
I hope this will help you to get the data before October 11th.
Best,
Diederik
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.comwrote:
Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia.* I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
*"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."*
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
- Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and
I have talked with you both about this directly
- Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generallyhttp://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analytics-team/in Feb 2013
- Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular
but neither of us do this with authenticated data
- Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the
Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters
- AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I think
the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful.
- Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia
Foundation and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Hi Lane,
I think it would be perhaps be good to differentiate as 'the source' and 'a source'. I sincerely hope that people around the world only use Wikipedia as *a* source for health information. The current wording is a bit fuzzy about this. We can probably confirm that it is popular as a source, but we don't know for sure if that is to get an initial idea what words mean, as some kind of elaborate dictionary, for background information, for access to the reference section etc.
Also, the last sentence assumes that the online sources are the biggest chunk of sources for medical information. Maybe it's a lame argument, but I'd suggest that the doctor (general practisioner) or even family is still the single most popular source for health information in the world. The word 'source' is a bit too vague to use in this context. Maybe resource or compendium makes more sense?
Best, Lodewijk
2013/10/4 Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com
Thanks Diederik and Dan,
We at WikiProject Medicine already have some simple data based on grok.sereports. Unless the system you guys are sharing reports traffic greatly less than what grok.se shows, then I already have an idea of what I want to say. If I followed your instructions, got some numbers, and I drew a conclusion, would the analytics team and the Wikimedia Foundation be comfortable with whatever I said and validate my assertions? What if I said
*"Judging by numbers of page views, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of health information on the Internet. Based on the available data, and assuming that page views indicate a choice in finding health information and that popularity is defined by what people choose most, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that Wikipedia has become the single most popular source of health information in the world."*
Is this strong enough? Is it too strong? Publishing a statement like this might be an invitation to the world to see if anyone can refute this. I am less interested in getting any particular kind of data than I am in identifying a statement that everyone in the Wikimedia movement can back.This is not going to be a technical article and it is preferable that I present no data at all - this article will be a feature in the magazine intended to present Wikipedia and start conversation. If anyone does have questions then I would like to anticipate them in advance and be able to prepare solid supporting evidence, and it would be nice to present data in response to requests for clarification. It might be that people with questions do not come to me at all - they may well contact the WMF and ask you guys to explain whatever I did. It does seem that the Wikimedia Foundation is competing with and perhaps out-performing organizations including NIH, the CDC, and the WHO in their own field of public health education outreach, so some people may have questions about what is happening here.
Since I feel like a simple statement like this has potential to influence the movement brand, I wanted to check in with you all. How do you guys feel about the statement I have written above? Would you be comfortable backing it? What would you want to see from me if I were to earn your support for making a statement like this?
If anyone has other interpretations of the available data or alternative proposals for some fundamental statement about the relative traffic to Wikipedia health content, then please share.
thanks,
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Hi Lane. I am working with Diederik on the pageviews API he mentioned, and your use case is one I care about a lot. Please please let us know what progress you've been making with the approach that Diederik mentioned, and if you get stuck people on this list can help. October 11th is my birthday and I don't like making people sad on my birthday.
Some things about the data stats.grok.se uses:
- It does not include pageviews for the mobile versions of our projects,
and this is pretty significant (like 20% if you want a rough and wildly inaccurate single number). You can take a look here to compare pageviews for mobile / non-mobile versions of our projects: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews_mobile, http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews. This past month, enwiki got 1.81B for mobile versions and 10.81B for non-mobile.
- It does include redirects/renames as two pageviews (slight
over-reporting)
- It has a newly found 2% to 6% under-reporting problem:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54504
As we build our pageviews API we are going to solve all these problems and more, but not for our first release.
On Friday, October 4, 2013, Diederik van Liere wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out to us, you are definitely asking the questions in the right column. As Dario mentioned, we are working on pageview api which will eventually have support to query pageview counts for all pages belonging to category Foo. But that won't be operational before October 11 but I do want to see if we can help you nonetheless.
My advice would be the following:
- Create an account on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Request access (
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Tools_Access_Request) to be part of the tools-lab project -- this project offers access to redacted mirrors of the actual production mysql databases. 3) Run the following queries (I took Medicine as an example category)
Query 1: #Get all subcategories for category Medicine SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'subcat';
This will give you the result as can be found on https:/en/ wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine It gives a list of all the first-order child categories of the root category 'Medicine'. Now obviously you could traverse further down and get sub-sub categories etc but this is merely to illustrate a minimum approach. (Constructing a category graph is not entirely trivial as you have to consider potential loops).
Query 2: #Get all pages from category Medicine SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'page';
This query returns all the article titles and their namespace for pages that belong to the 'Medicine' category. This mirrors the second table from https:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine
Query 3: #Get all pages from category Medicine and it's subcategories SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN (SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to = 'Medicine' AND cl_type = 'subcat') AND cl_type = 'page' AND page.page_namespace = 0;
The final query basically combines query 1 and query 2 and get's a list of article titles that belong either to the category 'Medicine' or one of it's subcategories. I have attached a csv file with the results of that query. It contains 2809 article titles. I am sure the queries are not dealing with all the edge cases, can be refined etc. but my goal was to illustrate how to tackle your problem using existing tools that are available for all.
- Finally, you would have to run a simple script and retrieve the
pageview numbers for each of 2809 article titles from stats.grok.se(this you will have to do yourself but a combination of bash, wget and qs should do the trick or write a python / php / ruby script that does this for you).
That's all ;)
We do want to make this feature part of a more general purpose pageview api for which we are discussing the contours on this list. Please chime in with your use-cases!
I hope this will help you to get the data before October 11th.
Best,
Diederik
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.comwrote:
Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia.* I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
*"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."*
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
- Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and
I have talked with you both about this directly
- Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generallyhttp://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analytics-team/in Feb 2013
- Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular
but neither of us do this with authenticated data
- Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the
Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters
- AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I
think the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful.
- Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia
Foundation and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Wikimedia-Medicine mailing list Wikimedia-Medicine@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-medicine
Hi Lane,
I think it would be perhaps be good to differentiate as 'the source' and 'a source'. I sincerely hope that people around the world only use Wikipedia as *a* source for health information. The current wording is a bit fuzzy about this. We can probably confirm that it is popular as a source, but we don't know for sure if that is to get an initial idea what words mean, as some kind of elaborate dictionary, for background information, for access to the reference section etc.
Also, the last sentence assumes that the online sources are the biggest chunk of sources for medical information. Maybe it's a lame argument, but I'd suggest that the doctor (general practisioner) or even family is still the single most popular source for health information in the world. The word 'source' is a bit too vague to use in this context. Maybe resource or compendium makes more sense?
Best, Lodewijk
+1 to this line of clarification
I'm going to catch up with Matthew later today and ask how the foundation/community have framed these kinds of issues before. I agree with Lodewijk's clarification but if there's a canonical way we've addressed these things in the past, we should consider it.
-Toby
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 8:06 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Hi Lane,
I think it would be perhaps be good to differentiate as 'the source' and 'a source'. I sincerely hope that people around the world only use Wikipedia as *a* source for health information. The current wording is a bit fuzzy about this. We can probably confirm that it is popular as a source, but we don't know for sure if that is to get an initial idea what words mean, as some kind of elaborate dictionary, for background information, for access to the reference section etc.
Also, the last sentence assumes that the online sources are the biggest chunk of sources for medical information. Maybe it's a lame argument, but I'd suggest that the doctor (general practisioner) or even family is still the single most popular source for health information in the world. The word 'source' is a bit too vague to use in this context. Maybe resource or compendium makes more sense?
Best, Lodewijk
+1 to this line of clarification
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
In the Netherlands, as a reason for stimulating what they refer to as e-Health, the Government ran a study among patients of various types and found that an overwhelming majority Google the diagnosis given them by their doctors. Since we know Wikipedia is favored by Google, obviously that means a lot of Wikipedia hits, but Wikipedia was also named in the report. This was seen as being of some concern, since lots of effort and public spending goes towards dissemination of information about drugs and conditions via specialist websites in the Netherlands.
I believe the reason Wikipedia is so popular is because of the "redirect" facility that enables all names for a condition or its treatment to point the user at the same article.
That said, most Wikipedia articles linked to some version of the World Health Organization's ICD-10 codes list will point to the proper websites that countries have decided gives the best information. Strangely, for the Netherlands Wikipedia, these links often lead to Belgian websites, but it's all for the common good.
As a "source" Wikipedia is usually lacking, but as a secondary search mechanism it wins hands-down from all of the other government-based efforts (such as hospital-portal websites).
Seeing it this way, you could make a case that "Wikipedia has become the single most popular Go-To resource for health information in the world." Jane
2013/10/4, Toby Negrin tnegrin@wikimedia.org:
I'm going to catch up with Matthew later today and ask how the foundation/community have framed these kinds of issues before. I agree with Lodewijk's clarification but if there's a canonical way we've addressed these things in the past, we should consider it.
-Toby
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 8:06 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Hi Lane,
I think it would be perhaps be good to differentiate as 'the source' and 'a source'. I sincerely hope that people around the world only use Wikipedia as *a* source for health information. The current wording is a bit fuzzy about this. We can probably confirm that it is popular as a source, but we don't know for sure if that is to get an initial idea what words mean, as some kind of elaborate dictionary, for background information, for access to the reference section etc.
Also, the last sentence assumes that the online sources are the biggest chunk of sources for medical information. Maybe it's a lame argument, but I'd suggest that the doctor (general practisioner) or even family is still the single most popular source for health information in the world. The word 'source' is a bit too vague to use in this context. Maybe resource or compendium makes more sense?
Best, Lodewijk
+1 to this line of clarification
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
On 10/04/2013 01:27 PM, Jane Darnell wrote:
In the Netherlands, as a reason for stimulating what they refer to as e-Health, the Government ran a study among patients of various types and found that an overwhelming majority Google the diagnosis given them by their doctors.
Yes, I was going to mention that in response to Lane's proposed wording.
It's probably somewhat misleading (from the typical web reader's point of view) to say:
"Wikipedia has become the single most popular source of health information in the world"
Even if Wikipedia is highest in page views, I feel search engines should be mentioned to provide a realistic picture.
E.g.
"Search engines increasingly lead people to Wikipedia, which is one of the factors in making Wikipedia the single highest traffic source of health information in the world."
Exact wording is up to you, but think it's worth a mention.
Speaking just for myself, not on behalf of the Foundation.
Matt Flaschen
On 10/04/2013 11:39 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
"Search engines increasingly lead people to Wikipedia, which is one of the factors in making Wikipedia the single highest traffic source of health information in the world."
I can search for images, but only when they have words associated with them, e.g. descriptions, tags or categories.
In this sense, doctors examining a patient and giving them a diagnosis is similar to tagging an image. Suddenly, the illness that this patient felt becomes possible to search.
Can I just say how geektastically awesome it is that we're having a discussion about how to frame claims about Wikipedia's popularity? Now this is what lists are FOR.
But in the interest of avoiding stasishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasis_(rhetoric)#Stasis, I also want to say to Lane: don't sweat the language too much ;) You're not going to be spouting untruths or despoiling the brand if you say Wikipedia is the, or one of the, highest trafficked websites in the world for health info. Wikipedia researchers make claims like that frequently, and often with less data to back it up than you're offering.
Also, Lane: do you want someone to script up that pageview request? I agree with Erik that using WP Med/WP Health categories will get you better results. I've been on the hook for getting some similar data for Biosthmores for about... 6 months now. I could work on it on my own time some evening this week.
- J
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 5:15 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 10/04/2013 11:39 PM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
"Search engines increasingly lead people to Wikipedia, which is one of the factors in making Wikipedia the single highest traffic source of health information in the world."
I can search for images, but only when they have words associated with them, e.g. descriptions, tags or categories.
In this sense, doctors examining a patient and giving them a diagnosis is similar to tagging an image. Suddenly, the illness that this patient felt becomes possible to search.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
______________________________**_________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/analyticshttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Good question, Lane. Two years ago I made an study on Dengue fever, and how to predict its behavior based on Wikipedia traffic of related content to that disease.
Is this strong enough?
For your question I can state that for Dengue fever, for Portuguese content and accessed from Brazil: Yes -- Wikipedia is a good data provider for such studies and predictions.
Have you asked someone from Research-wiki list? Jonas
Well, I'd say if the data you got from stats.grok.se supports your claim, then the statement is definitely not too strong. As I said, that data can be under-reporting our traffic by maybe 20% so we have quite a bit of margin for error. Personally, what I'd like to see in order to stand behind you is:
1. the numbers you got for health-related pageviews from stats.grok.se and how you crunched them 2. the numbers you got for health-related pageviews for the other sources (NIH, CDC, WHO, etc.)
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.comwrote:
Thanks Diederik and Dan,
We at WikiProject Medicine already have some simple data based on grok.sereports. Unless the system you guys are sharing reports traffic greatly less than what grok.se shows, then I already have an idea of what I want to say. If I followed your instructions, got some numbers, and I drew a conclusion, would the analytics team and the Wikimedia Foundation be comfortable with whatever I said and validate my assertions? What if I said
*"Judging by numbers of page views, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of health information on the Internet. Based on the available data, and assuming that page views indicate a choice in finding health information and that popularity is defined by what people choose most, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that Wikipedia has become the single most popular source of health information in the world."*
Is this strong enough? Is it too strong? Publishing a statement like this might be an invitation to the world to see if anyone can refute this. I am less interested in getting any particular kind of data than I am in identifying a statement that everyone in the Wikimedia movement can back.This is not going to be a technical article and it is preferable that I present no data at all - this article will be a feature in the magazine intended to present Wikipedia and start conversation. If anyone does have questions then I would like to anticipate them in advance and be able to prepare solid supporting evidence, and it would be nice to present data in response to requests for clarification. It might be that people with questions do not come to me at all - they may well contact the WMF and ask you guys to explain whatever I did. It does seem that the Wikimedia Foundation is competing with and perhaps out-performing organizations including NIH, the CDC, and the WHO in their own field of public health education outreach, so some people may have questions about what is happening here.
Since I feel like a simple statement like this has potential to influence the movement brand, I wanted to check in with you all. How do you guys feel about the statement I have written above? Would you be comfortable backing it? What would you want to see from me if I were to earn your support for making a statement like this?
If anyone has other interpretations of the available data or alternative proposals for some fundamental statement about the relative traffic to Wikipedia health content, then please share.
thanks,
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Hi Lane. I am working with Diederik on the pageviews API he mentioned, and your use case is one I care about a lot. Please please let us know what progress you've been making with the approach that Diederik mentioned, and if you get stuck people on this list can help. October 11th is my birthday and I don't like making people sad on my birthday.
Some things about the data stats.grok.se uses:
- It does not include pageviews for the mobile versions of our projects,
and this is pretty significant (like 20% if you want a rough and wildly inaccurate single number). You can take a look here to compare pageviews for mobile / non-mobile versions of our projects: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews_mobile, http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews. This past month, enwiki got 1.81B for mobile versions and 10.81B for non-mobile.
- It does include redirects/renames as two pageviews (slight
over-reporting)
- It has a newly found 2% to 6% under-reporting problem:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54504
As we build our pageviews API we are going to solve all these problems and more, but not for our first release.
On Friday, October 4, 2013, Diederik van Liere wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out to us, you are definitely asking the questions in the right column. As Dario mentioned, we are working on pageview api which will eventually have support to query pageview counts for all pages belonging to category Foo. But that won't be operational before October 11 but I do want to see if we can help you nonetheless.
My advice would be the following:
- Create an account on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- Request access (
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Tools_Access_Request) to be part of the tools-lab project -- this project offers access to redacted mirrors of the actual production mysql databases. 3) Run the following queries (I took Medicine as an example category)
Query 1: #Get all subcategories for category Medicine SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'subcat';
This will give you the result as can be found on https:/en/ wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine It gives a list of all the first-order child categories of the root category 'Medicine'. Now obviously you could traverse further down and get sub-sub categories etc but this is merely to illustrate a minimum approach. (Constructing a category graph is not entirely trivial as you have to consider potential loops).
Query 2: #Get all pages from category Medicine SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN ('Medicine') AND cl_type = 'page';
This query returns all the article titles and their namespace for pages that belong to the 'Medicine' category. This mirrors the second table from https:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine
Query 3: #Get all pages from category Medicine and it's subcategories SELECT page.page_title, page.page_namespace FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to IN (SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to = 'Medicine' AND cl_type = 'subcat') AND cl_type = 'page' AND page.page_namespace = 0;
The final query basically combines query 1 and query 2 and get's a list of article titles that belong either to the category 'Medicine' or one of it's subcategories. I have attached a csv file with the results of that query. It contains 2809 article titles. I am sure the queries are not dealing with all the edge cases, can be refined etc. but my goal was to illustrate how to tackle your problem using existing tools that are available for all.
- Finally, you would have to run a simple script and retrieve the
pageview numbers for each of 2809 article titles from stats.grok.se(this you will have to do yourself but a combination of bash, wget and qs should do the trick or write a python / php / ruby script that does this for you).
That's all ;)
We do want to make this feature part of a more general purpose pageview api for which we are discussing the contours on this list. Please chime in with your use-cases!
I hope this will help you to get the data before October 11th.
Best,
Diederik
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.comwrote:
Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia.* I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
*"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."*
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
- Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and
I have talked with you both about this directly
- Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generallyhttp://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analytics-team/in Feb 2013
- Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular
but neither of us do this with authenticated data
- Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the
Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters
- AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I
think the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful.
- Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia
Foundation and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Hi Lane,
Did you see these reports?
Here is a category tree below category 'Health' on English Wikipedia (with some out-of-context sub branches blacklisted).
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2013-07/cat egories_wp-en_cat_Health_2013-07.html
Here are the page views for articles in all those categories:
Warning the list is overly complete by design:
Some top ranking titles in this list may seem out of place.
Please note that any Wikipedia article can have tens of categories assigned to it.
A popular article will rank high in any list where it's featured, regardless of the category under review.
Thus a well-known singer may be top ranking in a list about politicians, because he/she also played a minor or brief role in politics.
Iterative pruning of the category tree will yield better results. Now you have to do final filtering yourself.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2013-07/pag eviews_wp-en_cat_Health_2013-07.html
New insight:
Instead of using the category hierarchy, article lists from WikiProjects would yield cleaner results, and would suffice for many purposes, notably yours :-)
Cheers,
Erik
From: analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Lane Rasberry Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 4:39 PM To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. Cc: Jake Orlowitz; Anthony Cole; James Heilman; Wiki Medicine discussion; Matthew Roth Subject: Re: [Analytics] need traffic data for health content...
Thanks Diederik and Dan,
We at WikiProject Medicine already have some simple data based on grok.se reports. Unless the system you guys are sharing reports traffic greatly less than what grok.se shows, then I already have an idea of what I want to say. If I followed your instructions, got some numbers, and I drew a conclusion, would the analytics team and the Wikimedia Foundation be comfortable with whatever I said and validate my assertions? What if I said -
"Judging by numbers of page views, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of health information on the Internet. Based on the available data, and assuming that page views indicate a choice in finding health information and that popularity is defined by what people choose most, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that Wikipedia has become the single most popular source of health information in the world."
Is this strong enough? Is it too strong? Publishing a statement like this might be an invitation to the world to see if anyone can refute this. I am less interested in getting any particular kind of data than I am in identifying a statement that everyone in the Wikimedia movement can back. This is not going to be a technical article and it is preferable that I present no data at all - this article will be a feature in the magazine intended to present Wikipedia and start conversation. If anyone does have questions then I would like to anticipate them in advance and be able to prepare solid supporting evidence, and it would be nice to present data in response to requests for clarification. It might be that people with questions do not come to me at all - they may well contact the WMF and ask you guys to explain whatever I did. It does seem that the Wikimedia Foundation is competing with and perhaps out-performing organizations including NIH, the CDC, and the WHO in their own field of public health education outreach, so some people may have questions about what is happening here.
Since I feel like a simple statement like this has potential to influence the movement brand, I wanted to check in with you all. How do you guys feel about the statement I have written above? Would you be comfortable backing it? What would you want to see from me if I were to earn your support for making a statement like this?
If anyone has other interpretations of the available data or alternative proposals for some fundamental statement about the relative traffic to Wikipedia health content, then please share.
thanks,
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Lane. I am working with Diederik on the pageviews API he mentioned, and your use case is one I care about a lot. Please please let us know what progress you've been making with the approach that Diederik mentioned, and if you get stuck people on this list can help. October 11th is my birthday and I don't like making people sad on my birthday.
Some things about the data stats.grok.se uses:
1. It does not include pageviews for the mobile versions of our projects, and this is pretty significant (like 20% if you want a rough and wildly inaccurate single number). You can take a look here to compare pageviews for mobile / non-mobile versions of our projects: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews_mobile, http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/pageviews. This past month, enwiki got 1.81B for mobile versions and 10.81B for non-mobile.
2. It does include redirects/renames as two pageviews (slight over-reporting)
3. It has a newly found 2% to 6% under-reporting problem: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54504
As we build our pageviews API we are going to solve all these problems and more, but not for our first release.
On Friday, October 4, 2013, Diederik van Liere wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out to us, you are definitely asking the questions in the right column. As Dario mentioned, we are working on pageview api which will eventually have support to query pageview counts for all pages belonging to category Foo. But that won't be operational before October 11 but I do want to see if we can help you nonetheless.
My advice would be the following:
1) Create an account on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
2) Request access (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Tools_Access_Request) to be part of the tools-lab project -- this project offers access to redacted mirrors of the actual production mysql databases.
3) Run the following queries (I took Medicine as an example category)
Query 1:
#Get all subcategories for category Medicine
SELECT
page.page_title
FROM
page
INNER JOIN
categorylinks
ON
page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from
WHERE
cl_to IN ('Medicine')
AND
cl_type = 'subcat';
This will give you the result as can be found on https:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine
It gives a list of all the first-order child categories of the root category 'Medicine'. Now obviously you could traverse further down and get sub-sub categories etc but this is merely to illustrate a minimum approach. (Constructing a category graph is not entirely trivial as you have to consider potential loops).
Query 2:
#Get all pages from category Medicine
SELECT
page.page_title,
page.page_namespace
FROM
page
INNER JOIN
categorylinks
ON
page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from
WHERE
cl_to IN ('Medicine')
AND
cl_type = 'page';
This query returns all the article titles and their namespace for pages that belong to the 'Medicine' category. This mirrors the second table from https:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Medicine
Query 3:
#Get all pages from category Medicine and it's subcategories
SELECT
page.page_title,
page.page_namespace
FROM
page
INNER JOIN
categorylinks
ON
page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from
WHERE cl_to IN (SELECT page.page_title FROM page INNER JOIN categorylinks ON page.page_id = categorylinks.cl_from WHERE cl_to = 'Medicine' AND cl_type = 'subcat')
AND
cl_type = 'page'
AND page.page_namespace = 0;
The final query basically combines query 1 and query 2 and get's a list of article titles that belong either to the category 'Medicine' or one of it's subcategories.
I have attached a csv file with the results of that query. It contains 2809 article titles. I am sure the queries are not dealing with all the edge cases, can be refined etc. but my goal was to illustrate how to tackle your problem using existing tools that are available for all.
4) Finally, you would have to run a simple script and retrieve the pageview numbers for each of 2809 article titles from stats.grok.se (this you will have to do yourself but a combination of bash, wget and qs should do the trick or write a python / php / ruby script that does this for you).
That's all ;)
We do want to make this feature part of a more general purpose pageview api for which we are discussing the contours on this list. Please chime in with your use-cases!
I hope this will help you to get the data before October 11th.
Best,
Diederik
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com wrote:
Hello Wikipedia data enthusiasts!
My name is Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry, and I contribute to health content on English Wikipedia. I am writing to ask for help from WMF people and community allies in drafting and backing with evidence a statement for publication in a medical journal. The statement that I would like to make is something like this:
"The amount of traffic received by health articles on Wikipedia makes Wikipedia a significant source of health information."
When I make this statement, I would like to be able to do so as clearly as possible and in a way that is backed by authentication by the Wikimedia Foundation and probably a bit of data, perhaps in the form of a comparison with traffic to another health website. I happen to work for the US-based non-profit organization Consumer Reports, and we have thought about comparing Wikipedia's traffic with WebMD's traffic, as WebMD is sometimes reported as being the most popular source of health information online or in the world. At Consumer Reports we get traffic data from Nielsen, so that would be the source for comparison data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Holdings
I need help from other stakeholders from this because if this article is published - and this is not unlikely because it was requested of me - then it could be cited by other people doing outreach as supporting evidence of the impact and worthiness of developing Wikimedia content related to health. Even if it is not published in this instance the increasing media attention which Wikipedia health content is getting merits having some verified statement to share about traffic.
I wrote more about why I need this statement and how it can be reused at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Project_Med/traffic
I am writing some individuals in addition to sending this to mailing lists for the following reasons:
. Dario and Jonathan Morgan, you both are Wikimedia data people and I have talked with you both about this directly
. Erik Zachte, I talked with you about this generally http://bluerasberry.com/2013/02/the-metric-i-want-from-the-wikimedia-analyt ics-team/ in Feb 2013
. Doc James, we both say that Wikipedia health content is popular but neither of us do this with authenticated data
. Jake Orlowitz, you are managing Wikipedia's relationship with the Cochrane Collaboration and they also are partnering with the Wikipedia health community on the premise that traffic matters
. AnthonyhCole, you were asking me for my opinion about what I think the WMF could do to support people doing Wikipedia outreach in health. I think lots of people would find a statement about traffic to health articles useful.
. Matthew Roth, you manage communications at the Wikimedia Foundation and if you want any input into what I am doing then I would love to have your advice.
I need this soon - perhaps by October 11? Is that possible? How much work would it be to make this statement? Can someone with the WMF Analytics Team and WMF communications help me? Am I in the right forums?
Thanks,
[Reposting without thread history, to get past mailing list filter]
From: Erik Zachte [mailto:ezachte@wikimedia.org] Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 5:04 PM To: 'A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics.' Cc: 'Jake Orlowitz'; 'Anthony Cole'; 'James Heilman'; 'Wiki Medicine discussion'; 'Matthew Roth' Subject: RE: [Analytics] need traffic data for health content...
Hi Lane,
Did you see these reports?
Here is a category tree below category 'Health' on English Wikipedia (with some out-of-context sub branches blacklisted).
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2013-07/cat egories_wp-en_cat_Health_2013-07.html
Here are the page views for articles in all those categories:
Warning the list is overly complete by design:
Some top ranking titles in this list may seem out of place.
Please note that any Wikipedia article can have tens of categories assigned to it.
A popular article will rank high in any list where it's featured, regardless of the category under review.
Thus a well-known singer may be top ranking in a list about politicians, because he/she also played a minor or brief role in politics.
Iterative pruning of the category tree will yield better results. Now you have to do final filtering yourself.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2013-07/pag eviews_wp-en_cat_Health_2013-07.html
New insight:
Instead of using the category hierarchy, article lists from WikiProjects would yield cleaner results, and would suffice for many purposes, notably yours :-)
Cheers,
Erik