[Foundation-l] clicktracking

[John Vandenberg]

subject was: hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 10:03 AM, Howie Fung <hfung at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The Usability team discussed this issue at length this afternoon.  ...
>
> Regarding the data behind the decision.  First, let me apologize for the
> tardiness.  The engineer who implemented the clicktracking of the left
> nav recently returned from vacation, so you can probably imagine how
> things might be a little difficult to find after being away for a
> while.   Please see [1] for more details, but a quick summary is that we
> measured the click behavior for two groups of English Wikipedia users,
> Monobook and Vector (Vector users are primarily those who participated
> in the beta).  Of Monobook and Vector users, 0.95% and 0.28% clicked on
> the language links (out of 126,180 and 180,873 total clicks),
> respectively.  We felt that fewer than 1% of Monobook clicks was a
> reasonable threshold for hiding the Language links, especially when
> taken in the context of the above design principle and the
> implementation (state persists after expanding).
>....
>
> Thank you for your input.
>
> Howie, on behalf of the User Experience Team at WMF
>
> [1] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Left_Nav_Click_Data
> [2]..

When can we expect the clicktracking data to be available?  You
mention "users"; do you mean registered users?  Were anonymous IP's
considered to be a separate class of users, or were they lumped into
the "monobook skin" numbers?  It should be obvious that hiding
interwikis for users who are not logged in should be based on data of
users who are not logged in and thus do not have a preference they can
toggle.

Also, I am interested in what clicktracking is occurring, whether the
data is being anonymised before being put into the hands of the
usability team, whether appropriately anonymised data will be
available to other researchers, etc.

This was mentioned briefly on wiki-research-l.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2010-April/000975.html

I recall similar functionality being _explicitly_ deactivated on
English Wikipedia as soon as Matt Bisanz brought it to the attention
of the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, yet the above says
that the data was taken from English Wikipedia!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Committee/Audit_Subcommittee/Archive_1#New_privacy_issue.3F

The UsabilityInitiative extension is enabled on most wikis; e.g..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Version
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Especial:Versi%C3%B3n

Is clicktracking now occurring on all WMF projects?

--
John Vandenberg