On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 7:18 PM, Asaf Bartov abartov@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 1:23 PM, C. Scott Ananian cananian@wikimedia.org wrote:
- Is the rise in global south page views specifically to *enwiki*, or
is it to local wikis?
Not actually an either/or. The answer seems to me to be "yes", i.e. all wikis -- that is, all projects, all languages.
It may *seem to you* to be "yes", but the data indicates that the answer differs, depending where you look. For example, the data clearly indicates that the stunning rise in Iran is almost entirely due to enwiki. enwiki gains over 80 million page views, fawiki gains only 10 million. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cscott/2014_December_metrics for a convincing graph.
I think it's important that we determine the actual answers to these questions, instead of trusting our instincts.
Some definitely do. Another major factor, mentioned today, is that in some countries, mobile devices just don't come with good local languages support, and people are putting up with that and using what the device does give them, which are generally the major, colonial languages.
Hm, the word "colonial" bothers me here. I know you mean "historically colonial", but in the modern world English is also a trade language, not just a formerly-colonial language. Much access to enwiki is due to its trade-language status.
I feel strongly that we have a moral obligation to offer good local language support, but I also feel that we shouldn't label and dismiss readers who want to learn/practice/find information in a trade language. (This is one of the reasons I'm a fan of simplewiki, but that's a whole 'nuther discussion.)
On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Salvador A salvador1983@gmail.com wrote:
I was reading the presentation on metrics and the point about Mexico's decreasing of views on Wikipedia called my attention.
I dug into the numbers a little more; see the graphs at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cscott/2014_December_metrics
It's a bit confusing. At this moment I'm inclined to say that the computation of "decliners" was in some way erroneous; neither the page views for Mexico nor the overall pageviews for eswiki seem to support the large annual declines reported.
On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cscott/2014_December_metrics I compute an annual decline for Mexico of 12.4% (compared to 23.2% reported at the metrics meeting), which compares to an eswiki annual decline of 4.8% (excludings bots and spiders).
So Mexico is indeed concerning -- it's declining at three times the eswiki rate. But eswiki as a whole seems like it ought to also be a concern. And I'd like to understand why I can't reproduce the much higher numbers shown in the Metrics meeting. --scott