[Foundation-l] Where do our readers come from? Q&A

[Erik Zachte]

Here is a Q&A on all issues raised:
Q=question/R=Remark, A=answer

I put the more general questions on top. 

Cheers, Erik Zachte

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Q: Nikola Smolenski
Is it first time these reports are published?

A: 
Yes, expect trend report to grow by accretion over time.
Other reports will be built from data for recent (6) months only

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R: Andrew Gray
Andrew explains why distribution of page requests over countries favors
Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries:
'Some Wikipedias - the ones which insist on only-free-images - do not use
local uploads at all.'

A: 
Thanks for explaining this unexpected distribution of page views on Commons,
I had no idea.

Spain		30.0%	
USA		29.2%	
Brazil	8.5%	
Argentina	4.8%	
Mexico	3.9%	
Germany	3.3%	
France	2.1%	
Venezuela	1.9%	
Chile		1.4%	
Costa Rica	1.4%	
Italy		1.4%	
Uruguay	1.2%	
Colombia	1.2%	
Portugal	1.1%	
 
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R: Mark Williamson

Two main factors influencing choice of Wikipedia language:
# Fluency of the Internet-using population of a country in English. 
# Quality of the native Wikipedia.

A: 
Like you say. Many Scandinavians (and Dutch people I might add) probably
switch between English and local content all the time.
Personally I tend to look at English Wp first I many instances, because of
obviously richer content and larger depth. 

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Q: Ziko van Dijk
Why are 40 % of the visitors of ksh.WP (the dialect of Cologne) from Japan. 
Why are 25 % of the visitors of eu.WP (Basque) from Poland?

Q: Andre Engels
I think bots are a likely explanation in the eu case 
(unless Erik is using an algorithm that filters out bots)

A: 
KSH used to be code for Kashmir. Still not Japan, but much closer than
Cologne.
Maybe Japanese mountaineers caused this spike ? (only half kidding)

As for eu.wp: Would Polish presume there also is a European Wikipedia? Just
a guess.

I do filter bots

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R: Teun Spaans
For trends, I would expect a bar indicating upward or downward trend, not a
percentage bar.

A: 
We can have both, a notion of importance and of change: I might color code
cells as I do already in e.g. [1] 
This way large fluctuations really stand out. Let's first collect more
history. 

[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm


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Q: Nikola Smolenski
Could we get this for other projects?

A:
This question is of course not unexpected. 
One consideration is we need a certain sample size to make numbers
significant.
For other projects, with far less traffic, few country/language pairs would
be backed by sufficient data. 
See also below on extending the current reports with more table rows. 

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Q: Nikola Smolenski:
Please include at Wikipedia Page Views Per Country - Overview [1] number of
Internet users from [2], and number of views per Internet user? 

[1] http://tinyurl.com/yk43aq6
[2] http://tinyurl.com/yfv5bwn

A:
Done 

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R: Nikola Smolenski
It is obvious why Slovene Wikipedia is highly visited in Sierra Leone, and
Serbian in Suriname; URLs do matter :)
Although, I don't understand why so much. I would expect this distribution
by visitors, perhaps, but not by visits.

A:
Very interesting observation! So people from Sierra Leone try
'sl.wikipedia.org'. 
Why people from Surinam go to 'sr.wikimedia.org' is only slightly less
obvious to me, but apparently is happens

For countries with just a few hits in the sampled log the distinction
between visitors and visits gets blurred.

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R: Andre Engels
Ukrainian is not a small language by any means, yet Wikipedia visitors tend
to be drawn to the Russian Wikipedia instead.

A: Yes but article growth in Ukrainian Wikipedia has been speeding up in
recent months. [1]

[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaUK.htm

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R: Andre Engels
The Q3-Q4 comparison for most countries shows a shift from English to the
'vernacular'.

A: 
Interesting analysis. Let's see if this is a consistent trend.
However the monthly page views per Wikipedia language for which we have 2
year history do not show very significant shift from large to smaller
wikipedia's. 
See table 'Distribution of page views' at bottom of page of [1]: smaller
languages gain in share of page views, but very slowly.
 
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm

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Q: Nikola Smolenski / Milos Rancic
At Wikipedia Page Views By Country - Breakdown [1] and Wikipedia Page Views
By Country - Trends [2] could you include more languages (ideally all
languages)?
Some of the numbers are going below 0.1% of population, but some of them are
not mentioned even they are larger than 0.5% of population.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/yhp3an7
[2] http://tinyurl.com/yzga2hm

A:
Yes on some reports I do include smaller percentages for the largest
Wikipedia's as those represent significant numbers of page views.
I used different (and arbitrary) thresholds per report. The arbitrariness
could change, but I want to plead for a notoriety threshold: 

Here is a much more extended version of the breakdown report [1] (for this
discussion only)
It shows per country up to 50 Wikipedia's
An extra column shows the total number of records for this country/language
(for the 6 month period) on which the percentage is based. 
As you can see for the smallest countries that number is so low that it is
no longer significant.

Let us say we cut off not at 1%, but at an (arbitrary) absolute threshold of
x logged records per country/language pair (per row).
Let us say we cut off at average 5 records per month. Everything below that
threshold in the test report is in dark red. 
Personally I think this is still way too much detail for a general report.
Not because of Kb's but information overload.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/yjwoyre