Hello all,

The Discovery team recently updated the Wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org/ portal page by moving all inline JavaScript into a separate file in order to analyze the amount of incoming traffic that use JavaScript-friendly browsers. This information is very important to our team, as we endeavor to make the portal page more interesting and user friendly for all our visitors.

The results were very encouraging - here's the executive summary from the analysis document https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analysis_of_Wikipedia_Portal_Traffic_and_JavaScript_Support.pdf that can also be accessed from the Wikimedia Discovery page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery#Wikipedia.org_Portal_Page :

*On 5 February 2016 we deployed a patch to the Wikipedia Portal moving the inline JavaScript into a separate file, which enabled us to finally measure the proportion of traffic with JS support separate from the overall traffic to the Portal. This report covers logs of HTTP request from 5 Feb to 10 Feb, 2016. *

*Overall, 93% of the requests made to the Wikipedia Portal have JS support. However, a large component (45%) of this overall percentage is accounted by traffic from United States, which has an overall proportion of 96%. The remaining 55% of the traffic from 234 other countries show a lot of variation in JS support, with 86.5% on average. *

*We also performed an analysis of browser usage and learned that approx. 75% of the traffic comes from users with relatively modern browsers, with a few exceptions such as Internet Explorer 8 (3.2% of total traffic). Of those 17 browsers, 14 had populations with more than 93% JS support. That is, less than 7% of those browsers’ users had turned off JavaScript for privacy/bandwidth/other reasons. Interestingly, only 80% of Opera Mini 7 traffic and 60% of Android 4 / Chrome Mobile 30 traffic had JS support.*

Please let us know if there are any concerns or questions!

Cheers,

Deb

-- Deb Tankersley Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation