Server logs of page hits provide less and less value
in terms of knowing
what people are doing (was it ever possible to truly tell bots apart from
humans? to compensate for caching proxies run by organizations?), the more
client-side and mobile apps we develop. I think that it's inevitable that
any meaningful tracking will have to be done client-side. Looking for ways
to adapt our URL schemes for the sake of server logs seems like rearranging
the deck chairs on the titanic to me. We should be trying to put as little
work into it as possible. Our stats efforts should be rather focused on
more fine-grained client-side and mobile tracking, which is what we need to
truly answer questions, even on our old "static" pages like the articles
themselves. The same way that I've been working on tracking how long images
are being viewed for at the Amsterdam hackathon in preparation for Erik
Zachte's RFC on image views, we should be doing the same sort of
measurements on articles.
On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 12:51 AM, Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Oliver Keyes
<okeyes(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Actually, I'd argue it's not equivalent
at all, for two reasons:
1. it doesn't present all of the same data. In fact, it presents
very little data, compared to a pageview of the "File" page;
2. The argument behind MMV is, as I understand it, that people are
focusing on the images. It is designed so that people do so, on the basis
that people clicking on images probably want those images. As such, it'd be
inaccurate to weight it as equivalent to say
https://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%A7ello_Malpigi
<https://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar%C3%A7ello_Malpigi#mediaviewer/File:Marcello_Malpighi_large.jpg>
in textual value - we believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that someone
clicking for an image wants a media file, not a wall of text.
MediaViewer hash loads and File page requests have little to do with each
other. File page request happens when 1) someone clicks on a thumbnail, 2)
someone shares the URL of a file page and someone else follows that URL. In
the case of MediaViewer, only the first case results in a text/html request
to the server. The second case (which is about 30x more frequent) only
results in a bunch of AJAX calls and an image request (actually more than
one, due to preloading). Those AJAX calls could easily be made unique, if
that is of any interest.
So basically when you click on an image, MediaViewer uses AJAX requests
to load some of the information from the file page, then creates an <img>
tag so the browser loads a large image thumbnail. When you visit an URL
ending in #mediaviewer/..., that just tells the MV code to simulate an
image click as soon as the page has loaded.
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