On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 9:39 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Jon Robson wrote:
On 27 Mar 2015 2:11 am, "Quim Gil" qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
The last editor is not that relevant (and quite often it will be a bot),
Yet more people click on it for whatever reason: http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/#other-graphs-tab.
This is an incredibly spurious argument.
Sigh. Nowhere am I arguing. I give up on this mailing list thread.
You're manipulating the meaning of data to fit your own purposes. Is there _any_ bold link that you could place on top of every English Wikipedia mobile article that wouldn't receive substantial traffic given the overall amount of traffic that the site receives? Of course not.
You linked to this same graph to justify the existence of the horrible Special:UserProfile (i.e., "look, people are visiting it!"). Tell me, of the users who click on this username link in the mobile strapline, what percentage find the content helpful? What percentage immediately click back to the previous page? If you moved the strapline to the bottom of the article, how quickly would you stop citing a graph on wmflabs.org (trusted stats source that it is...)?
More generally we really need to pay attention to our data and rely on it more. I see far too many changes across the site based on guesswork and personal preferences and that's an anti pattern we need to reverse.
You mean like pointing to a graph showing that a link placed very prominently somehow means that the underlying feature is a good idea? That kind of specious reasoning? The anti-pattern is your behavior here.
Now we have a ux research team and ways to a/b test we can test different designs and see if they generate the correct behaviour.
Just to recap, you want to take a feature intended to humanize Wikipedia and turn it into a feature in which you can treat every visitor as a lab rat ready to be tested upon without their consent? Maybe instead of treating site visitors and readers as customers, we could treat them as colleagues and stop wasting their limited screen real estate with a relatively useless mobile strapline. Just a thought.
MZMcBride
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