On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 10:06 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree that there is value in continuity, but remember that Wikipedia
> articles change over time, so unless someone is using a specific rev for
> measuring every time that they make a change to how the page renders, then
> there is likely to be at least some unreliability in the measurement.
> Technical factors like bandwidth and geolocation may also be involved in
> skewing the validity of comparisons.

An astute observation that shows your deep knowledge about wiki
technology and web performance measurement. However, I'm pretty
certain that for this particular project, Facebook's HHVM engineers
tested the same revision of the article, and knew how isolate/separate
varying bandwith.


>
> For most citations, there appears to be a manually updated list here:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_with_the_most_references
>
> I wasn't able to find a list of articles with the most templates, although
> there are a few articles where the template expansion depth limit is
> exceeded.

As mentioned in the blog post that we want to socialize here
(http://hhvm.com/blog/9293/lockdown-results-and-hhvm-performance ),
"MediaWiki was benchmarked using the Barack Obama page from Wikipedia,
as was recommended by an engineer from Wikimedia foundation as
representative of their load." What you describe sounds more like a
recipe to find outliers, not examples that are reasonably
representative. Also, as Jeremy mentioned, the Obama article has a bit
of a tradition among MediaWiki developers as an example of a somewhat
complicated but popular article, also in other context than
performance - see eg.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Android_app_screenshot_after_top-of-page_improvements_(2014).png
or search for "Obama" on Phabricator. I think it's a straightforward
choice as the head of state of the country where Wikipedia is hosted,
and not really politically charged at that.
I'm usually all for crafting social media messages carefully and
avoiding gaffes, but in this case we may be overthinking things a
little.


>
> Perhaps we should take the discussion of how best to measure page rendering
> performance to Wikitech. Would that be ok with you?
>

I don't want to stop you from educating the performance engineers at
Facebook and WMF about the wrongness of their ways, but we should
indeed get this social media message out soon, and I assume it would
take Facebook a while to re-run their study anyway. In general, you
may be interested in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T97378#1285776
.



>
>
> Pine
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Jeremy Baron <jeremy@tuxmachine.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jun 12, 2015 12:41, "Pine W" <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > In terms of byte size, that article isn't even in the top 250. See
>> > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LongPages&redirect=no
>>
>> And by template count? Or cite template count?
>>
>> Also there's some value to continuity. We've been using the Obama example
>> for years.
>>
>> -Jeremy
>>
>>
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--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB

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