The mobile apps are definitely in the wild, my understanding (from some checks in the past and from the discussion in the other thread) was that it was just the 'normal' useragent for the phone with the addition of a WikipediaMobile identifier at the front (so that you could tell it was from the app). They aren't very common but I have seen some which I knew were app driven.

The reason this came up was that one of the discussions that came up in that other thread was to rewrite the user agent to be less unique which would make it harder for CUs to tell users apart (especially once they found out, which they often do and these discussions are on public lists). The compromise that Yuvi proposed was to send a 'special' user agent for checkuser so that it didn't lose the fingerprinting ability as much.

James

James Alexander
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur


On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:27 PM, ENWP Pine <deyntestiss@hotmail.com> wrote:


I got the impression from this discussion that the mobile apps aren't currently in use so the CUs have had no experience working with them. It sounds like I was mistaken.

Toby, what UA data do CUs currently see from edits made through the mobile apps?

CUs, is the information that you're currently getting from edits from the new mobile apps a good balance the concerns raised previously in this discussion?

Pine

> Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:36:16 -0700
> From: Toby Negrin <tnegrin@wikimedia.org>
> To: "A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who
> has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics."
> <analytics@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: mobile-l <mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, Oliver Keyes
> <ironholds@gmail.com>, Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Analytics] [WikimediaMobile] Mobile and CheckUser (Was
> [mobile-l] Wikipedia App User Agents)
> Message-ID:
> <CAAjh0EyqpFDke3P6Q5FxecOnE5yc7uSs_VS9HcB5khoxZ6-Yng@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

>
> Hey folks -- we aren't considering changing any of the data that goes into
> checkuser. That tool will be unchanged.
>
> This discussion only concerns backend logging EventLogging and page view
> analytics.
>
> thanks,
>
> -Toby
>

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