Bon dia / Hi,
I would like to ask around about the fact that we have very significant imbalances of
official statistics when it comes to the traffic in our wiki projects.
Let's look at the reading gross value for the English Wikipedia on January 2024.
Without applying any kind of filtering to their searching method, the website Wikimedia
Stats shows 12.697.373.117 visits, while the Pageviews tool from the WikimediaCloud in
Toolforge yields 8.864.755.474 visits.
This is a huge figure disparity, and both data repositories are hosted "under the
same roog" and most likely are the two more widely used tools for this purpose. Am I
wrong? For a smaller project, like the Catalan Wikipedia, there is a 19.5M vs 64.5M
inconsistency... Which changes a lot our conclusions in a tech situation in which we are
socially dealing with Google hiding results in our language from its search engine since a
couple of years ago. What am I missing about these value differences? As an experienced
editor, I have been regularly digging in our available data tools for several years. But
it's difficult not to encounter frequent problems of comparability, false positives,
and reliability. Not only for my personal pleasure, but when it comes to easily explain
our projects' data to the outside world via referring to a trustworthy portal.
That adds up to the fact that we are not able to see itemised statistics for some small
countries in Wikimedia Stats. We can filter how many millions of visits does the Dutch
Wikipedia get in Belgium or in the Netherlands, but we cannot see which is the language
use of each Wikipedia in Belgium (% of readers that accesses it in French, Dutch, German,
Walloon, Picard, English, etc). That feature disappeared in 2018 with the last update of
the dismantled WiViVi portal. Altogether, it makes it impossible to tackle biases or plan
actions by chapters, user groups or even academic policies regarding awareness or
revitalization of minoritized and endangered languages.
I am afraid that, this being my experience as a long-term editor, the ones of newcomers,
journalists, or even scientists may still be much more uncertain and confusing. Hopefully
someone can help to figure out some of these questions.
Salutacions / Best regards,
Xavier Dengra