Hi folks, I got this note from an external organization that wanted to know more about what Wikimedia changed so that they are now accurate getting referral info. Any pointers?
"Wikipedia was implementing a fix so it would not be “dark traffic" in the analytics reports. This has been happening for the past 10 months. Just noticed today that Wikipedia is showing again in the referrals report.”
Thanks.
I think this is more of an ops question, cc-ing them.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi folks, I got this note from an external organization that wanted to know more about what Wikimedia changed so that they are now accurate getting referral info. Any pointers?
"Wikipedia was implementing a fix so it would not be “dark traffic" in the analytics reports. This has been happening for the past 10 months. Just noticed today that Wikipedia is showing again in the referrals report.”
Thanks.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Hi Dan,
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87276
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:58 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
I think this is more of an ops question, cc-ing them.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi folks, I got this note from an external organization that wanted to know more about what Wikimedia changed so that they are now accurate getting referral info. Any pointers?
"Wikipedia was implementing a fix so it would not be “dark traffic" in the analytics reports. This has been happening for the past 10 months. Just noticed today that Wikipedia is showing again in the referrals report.”
Thanks.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Ops mailing list Ops@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ops
Thanks James, Dan, Chris and all for the quick answer.
Nice to see this change. As Alex Stinson pointed out in the Phabricator discussion, it helps with our GLAM partners so they can keep tracking how much referral traffic comes from WM projects.
-Andrew
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:02 AM, Chris Steipp csteipp@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan,
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87276
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:58 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
I think this is more of an ops question, cc-ing them.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi folks, I got this note from an external organization that wanted to know more about what Wikimedia changed so that they are now accurate getting referral info. Any pointers?
"Wikipedia was implementing a fix so it would not be “dark traffic" in the analytics reports. This has been happening for the past 10 months. Just noticed today that Wikipedia is showing again in the referrals report.”
Thanks.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Ops mailing list Ops@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ops
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
hey Andrew,
we're monitoring the impact of this change (which we rolled out on 2/22) with a number of external partners (BBC, Le Monde, JSTOR, Elsevier) and we're planning to write a full report in April. Elsevier reported that in June visible inbound traffic from Wikipedia dropped by 99% in June 2015. This change should fix this, while preserving the privacy of our readers browsing content over HTTPS.
Background: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_referrer_policy
Dario
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 7:20 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks James, Dan, Chris and all for the quick answer.
Nice to see this change. As Alex Stinson pointed out in the Phabricator discussion, it helps with our GLAM partners so they can keep tracking how much referral traffic comes from WM projects.
-Andrew
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:02 AM, Chris Steipp csteipp@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan,
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87276
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:58 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
I think this is more of an ops question, cc-ing them.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi folks, I got this note from an external organization that wanted to know more about what Wikimedia changed so that they are now accurate getting referral info. Any pointers?
"Wikipedia was implementing a fix so it would not be “dark traffic" in the analytics reports. This has been happening for the past 10 months. Just noticed today that Wikipedia is showing again in the referrals report.”
Thanks.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Ops mailing list Ops@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ops
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 Andrew,
Thanks for investigating/following up. We are having the desired effect then: organizations which rely on Wikipedia traffic to generate interest in their educational content, to recognize that was happening.
Out of curiosity who was asking? If it was someone well used on Wikimedia projects either in GLAM (i.e. NARA or Smithsonian) or in your news connections (maybe Washington Post?), we would be happy to include them in our research.
Cheers,
Alex
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:49 AM, Dario Taraborelli < dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
hey Andrew,
we're monitoring the impact of this change (which we rolled out on 2/22) with a number of external partners (BBC, Le Monde, JSTOR, Elsevier) and we're planning to write a full report in April. Elsevier reported that in June visible inbound traffic from Wikipedia dropped by 99% in June 2015. This change should fix this, while preserving the privacy of our readers browsing content over HTTPS.
Background: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_referrer_policy
Dario
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 7:20 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks James, Dan, Chris and all for the quick answer.
Nice to see this change. As Alex Stinson pointed out in the Phabricator discussion, it helps with our GLAM partners so they can keep tracking how much referral traffic comes from WM projects.
-Andrew
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:02 AM, Chris Steipp csteipp@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Dan,
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87276
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:58 AM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
I think this is more of an ops question, cc-ing them.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:55 AM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi folks, I got this note from an external organization that wanted to know more about what Wikimedia changed so that they are now accurate getting referral info. Any pointers?
"Wikipedia was implementing a fix so it would not be “dark traffic" in the analytics reports. This has been happening for the past 10 months. Just noticed today that Wikipedia is showing again in the referrals report.”
Thanks.
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Ops mailing list Ops@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ops
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
--
*Dario Taraborelli *Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter http://twitter.com/readermeter
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:49 PM, Dario Taraborelli dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org wrote:
This change should fix this, while preserving the privacy of our readers browsing content over HTTPS.
That depends greatly on what you mean by readers privacy. By definition referrers violate the privacy of reading the web, so great care should be taken when talking about privacy at the same time as referrers to avoid giving the wrong impression. I guess you mean HTTPS provides a lot of privacy, and referrers remove only a small amount of privacy. While these referrers were 'normal' in HTTP days, they are now explicitly a Wikimedia choice to send user navigation information to non Wikimedia servers, and often users have no idea about it. Before it was HTTP to blame; now Wikimedia is responsible.
If a link appears only once on Polish Wikipedia, then a referrer of 'pl.wikipedia.org' (i.e. just the hostname) is sufficient for the external webserver to know exactly which page the user was reading.
I suspect the medium appearances of an external link is 1 or 2 pages per wiki, which means referrers actually remove a lot of reader privacy. If I recall correctly, over 50% of webpage viewed have Google Analytics on them, which means Google could identify maybe 33% of the Wikipedia pages you click a link on. That is a lot of possible reader profiling.
It would be really interesting to see some statistics of the percentage of clicks on Wikimedia hosted pages where the click identifies what page the reader was on. Also worth exploring is how many external links have Google Analytics (or similar?) in the page.
On Tuesday, 1 March 2016, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Hi folks, I got this note from an external organization that wanted to know more about what Wikimedia changed so that they are now accurate getting referral info. Any pointers?
"Wikipedia was implementing a fix so it would not be “dark traffic" in the analytics reports. This has been happening for the past 10 months. Just noticed today that Wikipedia is showing again in the referrals report.”
Hey Andrew,
This was done in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T87276 to be more of a "good citizen" of the Internet, done last Tuesday. Credit to Dario and Brandon and others.
J.