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

Sat Jan 16 03:25:02 UTC 2010

I notice in that list both Belarusian Wikipedias are listed just as
"Belarusian Wikipedia". It would be very informative to know which is which
and to have visitor statistics on both :-)

skype: node.ue

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Erik Zachte <erikzachte at infodisiac.com>wrote:

> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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%
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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