Discovery December 2015

discovery@lists.wikimedia.org

20 participants
26 discussions

Re: [discovery] Example study that uses wdqs
by Shubham Singh Tomar 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

Hi David, The study sounds interesting. I would like to contribute. Let me know if I could be of any help. PFA my résumé. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shubhamtomar Blog: http://autodidact24.github.io Quora: http://www.quora.com/Shubham-Singh-Tomar GitHub: https://github.com/Autodidact24/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/shubhamtomar24 Resume: https://goo.gl/mfffdt On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 9:36 PM, Shubham Singh Tomar < tomarshubham24(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Hi David, > > The study sounds interesting. I would like to contribute. Let me know if I > could be of any help. > PFA my résumé. > > On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 9:06 PM, David Causse <dcausse(a)wikimedia.org> > wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> this is a study (in french) I found in the list of papers that should be >> reviewed for the next research newsletter: >> http://scoms.hypotheses.org/498 >> >> The purpose of the study is to model the social network of movie actors >> of the 1920s and 1930s with Wikidata. >> >> In few words it uses wdqs to export the dataset, applies some conversion >> with R and imports the graph into Gephi. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> discovery mailing list >> discovery(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery >> > > > > -- > *Thanks,* > *Shubham Singh Tomar* > *Autodidact24.github.io <http://Autodidact24.github.io>* > -- *Thanks,* *Shubham Singh Tomar* *Autodidact24.github.io <http://Autodidact24.github.io>*

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Upcoming work for Discovery for the rest of Q2: completion suggester beta features, page views influencing result ranking
by Dan Garry 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

As we reach the last month of the quarter, it's a good opportunity for us to reflect on where we want to go for the last part of our remaining time. On the one hand, we're in quite a good place. We're just wrapping up our work on our Q2 goal for search <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q2_Goals#Search>, which is excellent! On the other hand, the test showed minimal impact, so our users still aren't seeing the impact of our work. Since we can continue running A/B tests for improving language support relatively cheaply in terms of required engineering time, let's take a look back at what we've done previously and see if we can choose something high impact to work on! The completion suggester is a very promising avenue for us to invest in. As noted in our analysis of the initial test <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111858>, using the completion suggester instead of prefixsearch significantly reduced the zero results rate. We've not had an impact on this through other efforts, so this is interesting! In order to more thoroughly test the suggester, we can make it a Beta Feature <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119535>. This will allow editors to opt-in to testing it, and will gather us valuable qualitative feedback about what use cases the completion suggester could support better. The caveat, of course, is that the feedback will be from a specific segment of our user base (users who test beta features) which is more specialised than the intended audience (everyone). That said, the feedback will still be very helpful. There's quite a bit of work to do here; our initial test of the suggester was very hacky, but now that it's proven itself, we can be more rigorous. The other avenue is using page views to influence result ranking. This is in an earlier stage thant he completion suggester, in that it's a relatively unproven approach for us, but it's something that's logical and that we've been interested in for a while. But, we've repeatedly had to deprioritise it for other work. If something is popular, it makes sense to rank it up in search results. Obviously, we do not want to be *too* aggressive with this in case we create feedback loops, but I think the potential benefits are quite clear if done correctly. I explained a lot of this more briefly in our last standup, but hopefully this should give you all some guidance on where we're going. Thanks, and as always, if there are any questions then please let me know. Dan -- Dan Garry Lead Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation

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Calendars, holidays, vacations, and meetings
by Kevin Smith 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

A reminder to all of you who use google calendar to track your work events: Please keep it updated, especially for the next month and a half. 1. For days you are taking off (holiday, vacation, or other), please create an all-day event indicating that. Be sure to edit it to "busy", because all-day events default to "available", meaning they are invisible when someone is considering scheduling you into a meeting. 1b. For extra protection, you can also create yourself a meeting that spans your entire workday. That makes it even more obvious that you will be out, so makes it less likely that someone will accidentally schedule you into something. This extra step is totally optional. (I don't do it myself.) 2. Please RSVP accurately to meetings, with either a yes or no (or maybe). It's always very helpful to know who is planning to attend, but it's even more important in this season of taking time off, because some meetings can/should be canceled or rescheduled if enough people will miss them. 3. Don't forget to indicate your unavailability while traveling as well, by blocking off entire days (remember to mark them "busy"), or specific chunks of time. You can set those "private" to avoid exposing your specific travel plans publicly. Thanks, and happy winter to all! Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation

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Retrospective notes posted, with action items
by Kevin Smith 02 Dec '15

02 Dec '15

The notes from our monthly Discovery retrospective have been posted[1]. The action items were: * Dan: write a goal for improving the UX of the search page on-wiki * Dan?: Discussion of improving the relevance/sorting of results rather than just zero results rate * Moiz: Talk about whether we really can run A/B tests on the portal, since it's not subject to a deployment freeze * Dan: Follow up on the common terms query A/B test * David: Look into listing features that affected the results set for a query (sister project to 'query categorizer UDF') [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discovery/Retrospective_2015-11-30 Kevin Smith Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation

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Cirrus request logs are now in hive
by David Causse 02 Dec '15

02 Dec '15

Hi, The work started by Erik few month ago is finally done. Cirrus requests are now available in the hive table wmf_raw.CirrusSearchRequestSet. I really hope this will help us to understand the kind of queries we are serving and start to work on query classification as Mikhail suggested. David.

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Results of Language Switching A/B Test
by Oliver Keyes 02 Dec '15

02 Dec '15

Hey all, I'm pleased to share the results of our language switching A/B test. This was an experiment to see if language detection on failed queries - and then rerunning in the "appropriate" language - could produce a better outcome for users. The long and the short of it is that it does produce a marginally better outcome for web users, but not for API users. Our recommendation is to enable it as the default user experience for web users but NOT API users, if that is possible, and disable the test if not. You can see the full report at https://github.com/wikimedia-research/LangTest/blob/master/report.pdf Thanks! -- Oliver Keyes Count Logula Wikimedia Foundation

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Discovery December 2015