Like Nuria said: this is unique devices, not unique people. Many people in the Global
North use more than one device to access Wikipedia (desktop, tablet, phone).
Also I'd like to add a caveat: any long term change will have to factor in that this
ratio of devices owned per user isn't fixed over time.
Erik Zachte
-----Original Message-----
From: Wikitech-l [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gergo Tisza
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 22:54
To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in
Wikipedia and analytics.
Cc: Wikimedia developers; Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Analytics] Unique Devices data available on API
Very interesting, thank you!
Do you have any estimate of how much this overcounts? I checked the monthly uniques for
huwiki
<https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/hu.wikipedia.org/all-sites/monthly/20160301/20160331>,
and it's about 5.8 million, which is a bit higher than the total number of internet
users in Hungary (estimated to 5.2 million). This Gemius analyis
<http://www.gemius.com/all-reader-news/is-wikipedia-still-popular.html> from a year
ago claims a 30% reach for Wikipedia, which would be about 1.5 million. They use a
software panel (a demographically representative group of volunteers who installed
tracking software) so they might be inaccurate (and they only count traffic originating
from Hungary I think) but probably not by a factor of four.
On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Nuria Ruiz <nuria(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello!
The analytics team is happy to announce that the Unique Devices data
is now available to be queried programmatically via an API.
This means that getting the daily number of unique devices [1] for
English Wikipedia for the month of February 2016, for all sites
(desktop and
mobile) is as easy as launching this query:
https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/en.wikipedia.
org/all-sites/daily/20160201/20160229
You can get started by taking a look at our docs:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Unique_Devices#Quick_Sta
rt
If you are not familiar with the Unique Devices data the main thing
you need to know is that is a good proxy metric to measure Unique
Users, more info below.
Since 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation used comScore to report data
about unique web visitors. In January 2016, however, we decided to
stop reporting comScore numbers [2] because of certain limitations in
the methodology, these limitations translated into misreported mobile
usage. We are now ready to replace comscore numbers with the Unique Devices Dataset .
While unique devices does not equal unique visitors, it is a good
proxy for that metric, meaning that a major increase in the number of
unique devices is likely to come from an increase in distinct users.
We understand that counting uniques raises fairly big privacy concerns
and we use a very private conscious way to count unique devices, it
does not include any cookie by which your browser history can be tracked [3].
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices
[2] [
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#How_do_we_coun
t_unique_
devices.3F
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