Hi all!
On 17 March 2016 the Portal team deployed a patch to Wikipedia Portal to
log all user preferred languages. From the analysis of this additional
data, we found that approximately 70% of Wikipedia Portal visitors only
have English as their preferred language, and approx. 18% set a language
other than English. Around 12% of our users are multilingual (according to
their browser preferences), but many of those included English.
Users whose primary language is English or who included English as a
preferred language clicked through and searched at a remarkably higher rate
on a daily basis than users whose primary language is another language (60%
vs 50% and 50% vs 30%), but the latter group used the language links at a
much higher rate than the former (10% vs 20%).
In fact, English-speaking visitors' overall clickthrough rate was
12.5%-14.4% higher than non-English-speaking visitors', and were 1.3 times
more likely to click through, indicating, perhaps, that increased
localization efforts could better engage our non-English-speaking visitors.
Based on the data and patterns observed, we strongly support and encourage
the language detection and localization efforts the Portal team has begun
pursuing.
These and other findings can be found in the report on Commons
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analysis_of_Clickthrough_Rates_and_User_Preferred_Languages_on_Wikipedia_Portal.pdf>.
The graphs are especially cool and informative, even if I do say so myself.
Thanks,
Mikhail on behalf of Discovery Analytics
--
*Mikhail Popov* // Count Logula, Discovery
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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