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).
Il 17/03/21 10:53, Tilman Bayer ha scritto:
Are the underlying numbers published somewhere?
Hanlon's razor suggests to look at the most stupid explanation available for this number. The easiest piece of statistics currently available to someone who's looking for one in a hurry is the "unique devices" bit for "all Wikipedias": https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/reading/unique-devices/normal|line|all|(access-site)~mobile-site*desktop-site|monthly
This metric is widely misunderstood, but it's used nevertheless. It's even incorrectly quoted in the second paragraph of [[Wikipedia]] to support a figure on "unique visitors" (of which it says nothing). https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia&oldid=1015734941#cite_note-Wikimedia_Stats-13
It might be a coincidence, but the latest reading on that metric is 130 % of the first: it went from 1460 G in 2017-04 to 1910 G in 2021-03. Most of this change is presumably the increase in the number of devices available to people, but the trend might be meaningful when narrowed down to shorter periods and/or geographies/languages where the number of devices per household has remained relatively constant in this period.
Federico
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
Thanks Kate for the update!
Il 30/04/21 02:08, Kate Zimmerman ha scritto:
[...] active editors increased 18 percent, not 36 percent[3,5]. [...] [3] December 2020 content interactions and active editor data from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:December_2020_Wikimedia_movement_met... [...] [5] December 2015 active editor data from an internal query across all Wikimedia sites, showing 79,420 active editors
What kind of internal query? You can't compare active editor numbers calculated with different methods. For instance, you need to have the same: * content pages selection, * user activity thresholds, * global users aggregation/deduplication, * exclusion of bots, * seasonality corrections, * and crucially, distance from the observed period.
December 2020 data is less than 4 months old, so the active editor figures for the month will keep decreasing for a while until deletion activity is mostly done for the period. If you want to compare it to December 2015 data, you'd need to use the same method and run it against a snapshot of the data taken in April 2016.
Best regards, Federico
Hi Federico,
The data we have from active editors in 2015 is taken from a snapshot and uses the same filters and logic as the data for 2020. More about our definitions, as well as a link to the code we use to calculate the metrics, available here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Product/Data_glossary#Editors
Warm regards, Kate
On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 11:31 PM Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks Kate for the update!
Il 30/04/21 02:08, Kate Zimmerman ha scritto:
[...] active editors increased 18 percent, not 36 percent[3,5]. [...] [3] December 2020 content interactions and active editor data from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:December_2020_Wikimedia_movement_met... [...]
[5] December 2015 active editor data from an internal query across all Wikimedia sites, showing 79,420 active editors
What kind of internal query? You can't compare active editor numbers calculated with different methods. For instance, you need to have the same:
- content pages selection,
- user activity thresholds,
- global users aggregation/deduplication,
- exclusion of bots,
- seasonality corrections,
- and crucially, distance from the observed period.
December 2020 data is less than 4 months old, so the active editor figures for the month will keep decreasing for a while until deletion activity is mostly done for the period. If you want to compare it to December 2015 data, you'd need to use the same method and run it against a snapshot of the data taken in April 2016.
Best regards, Federico