[Foundation-l] clicktracking

[Howie Fung]

John,

We'll get the clicktracking data up over the next several days.  The 
team has been focused preparing for the next phase of usability rollout 
tomorrow, but we'll get something up by the end of the week at the latest.

I'll have Nimish, the developer of the click-tracking tool, answer your 
questions about segmentation and anonymization as he is more intimately 
familiar with how the tracking works.  But to my knowledge, the data 
represent all users, though we may possibly be able to segment out 
certain classes of users.  You're absolutely right -- the correct point 
of comparison for this feature should be anons.  Also, the data are 
anonymized and Nimish can describe this in more detail.

As far as I know, clicktracking is not being used on English Wikipedia.  
The UX team has been using it to gain insight into very specific 
behavior patterns and then turning it off.

Howie

On 6/8/10 7:15 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
> 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
>