For that example: of the visitors who clicked on one of the primary links, 17% of the users whose Accept-Language included Vietnamese as the first language went to the Italian Wikipedia. Not sure why! And while Accept-Language is not a perfect indicator, it is kind of our best bet for language detection and localization.

As for search being more popular than the links for one population vs the other: US accounts for approx. 40% of the total traffic to wikipedia.org with UK coming in 2nd at about 8% and the remainder accounted by the 200+ other countries (http://discovery.wmflabs.org/portal/#country_breakdown, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Analysis_of_Wikipedia_Portal_Traffic_and_JavaScript_Support.pdf&page=5). Given that 90% of all traffic to Wikipedia is direct traffic (http://discovery.wmflabs.org/portal/#referrals_summary), I suppose English-speaking US & UK visitors (the biggest group of visitors to the Portal) have the page bookmarked, go to it, and search because they're not especially interested in visiting Wikipedia in other languages. On the other hand, users of other languages might find it preferable to bookmark the main Wikipedia page of their respective language rather than go to wikipedia.org or are just used to going to wikipedia.org and then clicking on their language, even though the search box detects the user's language.

There's only so much we can do with the data we have. Thanks for the questions! I hope I've answered them, or provided any additional insights.

Cheers,
Mikhail

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 3:08 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
How do you interpret the 100 % figures at page 7 and things like the 17 % of "Vietnamese" users going to it.wiki per page 6? Such results IMHO mostly show that Accept-Language is a very poor indicator of the languages really understood by the user, as we've known for a long time.

The graph at p. 4 is more promising because it could tell us something about the relative advantages of search vs. manual selection that the users see depending on their conditions. We could discover more with breakdowns other than en/non-en accept-language. The main take away seems to be that for one population the search is 5 times more popular than the links, while for the other they are very similar... but why??

Nemo

_______________________________________________
discovery mailing list
discovery@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery



--
Mikhail Popov // Count Logula, Discovery

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Donate.