Thanks all for the feedback and conversation.

In the meantime, has anyone gotten GLAMorgan to report back any useful pageview data?

Regardless of small, medium, or large categories, I keep getting:
"Data for ... pages could not be loaded from the WMF pageview API (404 error)."

https://glamtools.toolforge.org/glamorgan.html

-Andrew

On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 10:10 AM Mary Mark Ockerbloom <celebration.women@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for posting the fabricator ticket; I too have subscribed.

I concur with others, lack of support for reliable tools for GLAM institutions has been a major concern for GLAMs for many years.

Mary Mark Ockerbloom

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 5:41 PM Fiona Romeo <fromeo@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Thanks for adding your perspective, Dominic. 

Here is the Phabricator ticket that tracks work the Foundation has been doing with Wikimedia Israel to resolve storage issues for the GLAM Wiki Dashboard: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T321702

The conclusion was that it would be best for the service to use the MediaRequest API, as Dominic has also recommended in his email. Further to this, the Foundation's Data Platform team is looking into a custom API endpoint for media requests by category to reduce/remove the need for data transformation and storage. As an interim solution for the GLAM Wiki Dashboard, we advised Wikimedia Israel to migrate their project from Amazon Web Services to our own servers and made capacity available for that. 

We don't know as much about the BaGLAMa2 issues at the moment. 

I'm very sorry to see our GLAM wiki community struggling with tool instability again.

Fiona

On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 21:34, Dominic Byrd-McDevitt <dominic@dp.la> wrote:

For my part, I'd like to point out that these issues are recurring problems, and also that when it comes to BaGLAMa lag, the longer it goes, the more unrecoverable it becomes. Data errors, once introduced, are not repairable.

Dozens of the tracked categories in BaGLAMa are DPLA institutions, and I have shared these links numerous times over the years. So I frequently get questions from partners who check their data and find it months out of date. There is nothing I can tell them in these situations, except that I have regularly seen data get that lagged, and then eventually it reaches a point where (presumably after someone finally reached Magnus?) all the backlogged months come in at once.

This causes its own problems, I believe, because I have to assume in such situations where data is generated after the fact, that it is all corrupt to some degree. My understanding of BaGLAMa is that it counts page views of articles using images from a category. But there is no MediaWiki log of when images were added to a page (or to a category), so if you are counting page views that occurred three months ago based on images that are in a page today, you might be counting crediting three past months with views for an image that was added last week.

This issue causes massive data errors in the other direction too. Sometimes you'll have an unexplained spike, like the several here (and by spike, I mean 700 million page views), and it's caused by the fact that an image that was on the main page for no more than hours caused BaGLAMa to count the entire month's page views of the main page. These errors are unrecoverable; they stay in the data and just increase the error of the overall total over time. There's never been a time where I could go to a maintainer and point out this massive data error and get that rerun or fixed. Instead, I am often in the embarrassing position of telling partners "Here is the analytics page, but there is a big overcount on one random month, so just always remember to mentally subtract 100 million from your total, and treat these numbers as very inexact."

So as long as we are talking about BaGLAMa at all, I do have to point out that it is an entirely flawed tool and the data is unreliable. And aside from all of those bugs, the methodology is very flawed, since it should not be using the Pageviews API in the first place. I consider the data essentially fictitious anyway— we know the images we are tracking are probably not even receiving half of the article views we are crediting to them, but we continue to report bad data, because our projects rely on having outcomes and reporting analytics. Glamorous and Glamorgan are based on the same flawed methodology.

And I haven't even started on the clunky UI, where an ever-growing list of 1000+ categories are all displayed on the landing page, many of which are typos or non-existent categories that can never be removed or cleaned up.

I guess my main point here is that no amount of band aids will ever resolve some of the issues, and we need to be thinking about entirely redoing the tool itself. Or we should have already done so as soon as the Mediarequests API was released—which was in 2019.

Thanks!

Dominic

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 6:50 AM Fiona Romeo <fromeo@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Dear Andrew,

Thanks for escalating these specific issues to us. Giovanna and I were both travelling in January so we haven't been as active in Telegram.

Are you aware of anyone else having issues with the GLAM Wiki Dashboard, or is it just The MET? I quickly sampled some of the institutions and only saw a "bad request" for The MET. We have been directly supporting Wikimedia Israel to optimise their service, so I will raise this issue with both Wikimedia Israel and the Foundation team that has some familiarity with their service. 

I noted these two BaGLAMa2 issues in the Telegram chat: 

https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/magnustools/issues/49/baglama-not-up-to-date

https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/magnustools/issues/50/baglama-not-adding-new-categories

Are there other BaGLAMa2 reports we should be aware of?

Metrics are definitely understood to be a priority for the Foundation and I heard yesterday that metrics tools rose to the top in Wikimedia Sweden’s survey too. There will be opportunities to discuss this further in the context of annual planning but I will see what can be done in the short term. 

More soon, 

Fiona

On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 10:57, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi WREN and GLAM folks, 

I need your insights into what could be a very problematic year for us in the GLAM wiki community, as our metrics tools to measure our impact are in crisis and disrepair. If you have any insights, please do share them here, or in the GLAM Wiki Telegram group where this conversation started happening recently.

I sent a "HELP!" message to the Wikimedia SE content partnerships help desk just the other day, included below, and hope this may be useful to start a conversation. If there is enough interest, we might want to start a wiki page to formally document our needs as a GLAM wiki community. Thanks.

-Andrew

----

To: help@wikimedia.se

I'd like to formally employ the Helpdesk's services in getting some care and attention to BaGLAMa2. It seems to have been failing since the end of last year, and even then, it was reporting extremely low figures for all categories. This is one of the few tools we have in the GLAM wiki community to measure impact and to make the case for sustaining our work.

https://glamtools.toolforge.org/baglama2/ 

Without these basic metrics, 2023 could prove to be a disastrous year for continuing efforts. So far, we have been unable to report good, reliable numbers to folks such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Smithsonian Institution. Other on-demand tools such as Glamorgan usually cannot handle such large category trees, and also have their own problems with not being able to read the pageviews API numbers accurately, which is another issue in itself.

https://glamtools.toolforge.org/glamorgan.html

In short - help! How can we get this on the radar screen of people who can put more care, attention, and resources into this? Thanks.

-Andrew

--

Fiona Romeo (she/her) Senior Manager, Culture and Heritage Wikimedia Foundation

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-Andrew Lih

Smithsonian Institution - Wikimedian at Large

Metropolitan Museum of Art - Wikimedia strategist

Previously: professor of journalism and communications, American University, Columbia University, University of Southern California

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