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.

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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