Hello,
I am an economist working on a research project analyzing contribution behavior on Wikipedia, and am interested in computing the fraction of individuals who use the site and make contributions. I have found the data on daily contributions, and am now looking for data on the number of individuals who use Wikipedia. I believe I have found the data I am looking for here:
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesUsageVisits.htm
Unfortunately, the data contained in that file only covers the period from August 2002 through October 2004. Does a similar database exist for later time periods? Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for you time and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely, Nathan Marwell
Nathan Marwell, 19/05/2016 01:06:
am now looking for data on the number of individuals who use Wikipedia
Does https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#Dataset / https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement help?
Nemo
Hi Nathan,
The old report was built from Webalizer logs, and Webalizer was abandoned after Oct 2004. We started to collect page views from 2008, but never did unique visitors ourselves after 2004.
Now WMF has counts for unique devices, which is quite dissimilar to unique people, and trends will be hard to interpret, but for now it's as good as it gets.
Erik Zachte
-----Original Message----- From: Analytics [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Federico Leva (Nemo) Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2016 11:40 To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. Subject: Re: [Analytics] Wikipedia visitor data
Nathan Marwell, 19/05/2016 01:06:
am now looking for data on the number of individuals who use Wikipedia
Does https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#Dataset / https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement help?
Nemo
_______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
Hi Nathan,
As Erik says, we don't have unique-reader numbers. We used to collect data via ComScore but this was dropped as it was felt to be inaccurate (though I'm not familiar with the details of exactly what was wrong with it) - see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia & https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement
For example, as of Jan 2010, estimates for some languages were:
* English, 190m/month * Japanese, 35m/month * Spanish, 32m/month * French, 26m/month * German, 25m/month
You might be able to use this, coupled with contemporary editor numbers, to get a rough approximation for activity rates *at that time*.
Incidentally, the old stats interface has a very rough "active editors per million *speakers*", which isn't at all the same thing (not all speakers use the internet, & not all internet users read WP) but may be interesting - https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm?sortcol=9D
Numbers more that 50/million (or 0.05% of speakers) are rare, and most are statistical anomalies driven by very small languages. However, there's a few with five to ten million speakers where we have fifty to a hundred editors per million speakers (eg Czech, Catalan, Swedish, Hebrew, Norwegian, Finnish). Note that these figures are for active editors (5+ edits/month) rather than "any editors", so the true participation rate will be higher.
I used to use a figure of "one in five thousand" for English Wikipedia in talks, but it looks like this was "active editors per speakers", and so definitely an overestimate. At a wild ballpark guess, maybe one in a thousand readers is an editor? Very curious to see what you come up with - please do let us know!
Andrew.
On 19 May 2016 at 00:06, Nathan Marwell nbmarwell@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
I am an economist working on a research project analyzing contribution behavior on Wikipedia, and am interested in computing the fraction of individuals who use the site and make contributions. I have found the data on daily contributions, and am now looking for data on the number of individuals who use Wikipedia. I believe I have found the data I am looking for here:
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesUsageVisits.htm
Unfortunately, the data contained in that file only covers the period from August 2002 through October 2004. Does a similar database exist for later time periods? Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for you time and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely, Nathan Marwell
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
As Erik says, we don't have unique-reader numbers. We used to collect data via ComScore but this was dropped as it was felt to be inaccurate (though I'm not familiar with the details of exactly what was wrong with it)
The biggest inaccuracy of comscore data was that it did not measure mobile usage, we know from our own metrics that about half of our pageviews come from mobile devices and, in many instances, for some wikis, mobile access represents >80% of access, so comscore was grossly underestimating unique users.
Reader team sends a newsletter to wikitech-l@ with this kind of information that might be helpful. See newsletter from Mayl: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-May/085465.html
On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 10:06 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
Hi Nathan,
As Erik says, we don't have unique-reader numbers. We used to collect data via ComScore but this was dropped as it was felt to be inaccurate (though I'm not familiar with the details of exactly what was wrong with it) - see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia & https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement
For example, as of Jan 2010, estimates for some languages were:
- English, 190m/month
- Japanese, 35m/month
- Spanish, 32m/month
- French, 26m/month
- German, 25m/month
You might be able to use this, coupled with contemporary editor numbers, to get a rough approximation for activity rates *at that time*.
Incidentally, the old stats interface has a very rough "active editors per million *speakers*", which isn't at all the same thing (not all speakers use the internet, & not all internet users read WP) but may be interesting - https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm?sortcol=9D
Numbers more that 50/million (or 0.05% of speakers) are rare, and most are statistical anomalies driven by very small languages. However, there's a few with five to ten million speakers where we have fifty to a hundred editors per million speakers (eg Czech, Catalan, Swedish, Hebrew, Norwegian, Finnish). Note that these figures are for active editors (5+ edits/month) rather than "any editors", so the true participation rate will be higher.
I used to use a figure of "one in five thousand" for English Wikipedia in talks, but it looks like this was "active editors per speakers", and so definitely an overestimate. At a wild ballpark guess, maybe one in a thousand readers is an editor? Very curious to see what you come up with - please do let us know!
Andrew.
On 19 May 2016 at 00:06, Nathan Marwell nbmarwell@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
I am an economist working on a research project analyzing contribution behavior on Wikipedia, and am interested in computing the fraction of individuals who use the site and make contributions. I have found the
data
on daily contributions, and am now looking for data on the number of individuals who use Wikipedia. I believe I have found the data I am
looking
for here:
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesUsageVisits.htm
Unfortunately, the data contained in that file only covers the period
from
August 2002 through October 2004. Does a similar database exist for later time periods? Any information you can provide would be greatly
appreciated.
Thank you for you time and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely, Nathan Marwell
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics