Re: [Wikimedia-l] Lower page views

Hi Anders, some notes about possible reasons below. As a data analyst in the Foundation's Readers department, I am tracking our overall pageview numbers on a monthly basis, which we report to the WMF board alongside other metrics about editor activity etc. (This is also publicly available at [1], where this recent pageview decline had already been remarked upon earlier. What's more, you can check this regularly updated chart for a visual year-over-year comparison: [2] ) There are probably multiple causes for this year-over-year decrease observable during the last few months. We know about one of them for certain: The recent rollout of "page previews"[3] to all but two Wikipedia versions. This is a new software feature that shows an excerpt from the linked article when the reader hovers their mouse over a link. It is designed to save readers the effort of clicking through certain links. So a decrease in pageviews was fully expected and is to some extent actually evidence for the feature's success. According to our A/B tests, this decrease is around 2-4% (of desktop pageviews). We are on the other hand going to measure this new, alternative form of reading Wikipedia (i.e. the number of previews seen) just like we measure pageviews now; there is currently a technical discussion about this on the Analytics-l mailing list. But for now it is not yet reflected in our public traffic reports. Google-referred pageviews did indeed see a year-over-year decrease of some percent since November (but not before) [4], although this may still not explain the entire rest of the year-over-year change in overall pageviews. Regarding Google's Knowledge Panel - i.e. their Wikipedia extracts that you mentioned - a research paper published last year [5] has confirmed that it indeed has a negative effect on our pageviews (which had long been the topic of speculation without much actual evidence). However, Google already introduced this feature in 2012, so it has been around over half a decade now and can't be responsible per se for any recent drops. One would need to look for more recent changes made by Google. (They actually made a tweak to the panels for a particular topic category in early November [6], but to me it seems rather unlikely to have had a noticeable effect on our overall Google referrals.) Likewise, the internet-wide multi-year trend towards mobile doesn't really explain this recent trend in our total (desktop + mobile) pageviews - as James already pointed out, just a year ago we were actually seeing a year-over-year *growth* of several percent for an extended time period. Generally, keep in mind that while page requests by bots and spiders are generally filtered out, the pageview numbers still encompass a smaller amount of other automated views and artefacts, which can also be responsible for sizable changes. In the data reported to the board [1] I apply various corrections to filter out some more of these. But the numbers at stats.wikimedia.org still include them. For example, if you had looked at the same year-over-year change last summer, you would have encountered an even bigger year-over-year pageview drop which however is almost entirely spurious: An issue found and mitigated in July/August 2016 had artificially inflated desktop traffic up to 30% during these two months. There is a Phabricator task to correct this in the publicly available data [7], but it is still open. Besides the monthly reports of core metrics at [1] which come with brief observations about trends, we also publish a more in-depth slide deck about readership core metrics once per quarter.[8] The next one will come out in two weeks and I plan to do some further analysis (e.g. check if the decrease was focused geographically) in preparation for that; so perhaps we will know a bit more then. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Audiences [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_pageviews_year-over-year_… [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews [4] http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/#traffic_by_engine and http://discovery.wmflabs.org/external/#traffic_summary , select weekly or monthly smoothing for easier comparison, but keep in mind the default view includes bots/spiders [5] Connor McMahon, Isaac Johnson, Brent Hecht: "The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies" https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15623 . BTW we are still looking for someone to volunteer a summary or review of this paper for the Wikimedia Research Newsletter/ Wikipedia Signpost, so that more community members can learn about this research - contact me in case you're interested. [6] https://9to5google.com/2017/11/08/google-search-knowledge-panels-news-publi… [7] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T175870 [8] Cf. last quarter's edition: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Readers_metric… On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 2:55 AM, Anders Wennersten <mail(a)anderswennersten.se> wrote: