Talk:Wikistats 2.0 Design Project/RequestforFeedback/Round2

My first reaction to the design was that it is absolutely beautiful and likely very functional as well. My second reaction was that "Number of articles deleted" should be added so that we could see "net new articles" as well. But it appears that those numbers can be backed out very easily from the previous periods data (please let me know if that assumption wouldn't work for any reason).

Perhaps it's too much too ask for, but several Wikis now have ORES scores calculated every month. For those wikis could you post average ORES scores? I like the numeric scores better than the class scores, but including either (or both) here would be an improvement. Maybe even scores for old articles, new articles, and deleted articles?

Thanks ~~~~

That's a really nice idea, thank you. We don't have this data yet, it's just available to query per-revision not aggregated for analytics purposes. But we'll definitely be incorporating it at some point in the near future and adding it to wikistats. Also, we will have a deleted articles metric and I'm thinking of ways to let you plot "net articles" through the interface by combining the two metrics.

Captured here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178019

If you see replies from me here, I'm talking about an alpha version of the "real" site that we're very close to launching. My comments and opening of new tasks are relevant to that, not the old prototype. We'll send more info soon, and post on here as well.

We have three main ways to navigate the site. You can find a question you're interested in with the Explore Topics widget. You can click through from the metric widgets on the Dashboard to the Detail page. And you can select a metric directly from the View more metrics link on the Detail page. Did you find all these ways? Did they make the site come together once you discovered them? Or do you feel lost at all? That's what we're trying to avoid, we want a way for everyone to find what they need.

After 5-10 min of usage here is what I noted:

• Visual Design: I find some Numbers are rather big and there are many different font sizes. It is just my intuition but it might look even more tidy with decreasing the size of some huge numbers a bit and as well harmonizing some font sizes.
• When I clicked on some metric, I missed a kind of "Breadcrumb" or "Back" navigation that would take me to a previous, overview oriented view (also the Logo is not linked (yet) to lead back to the main page)
• I really like that you employ questions in that searchbox-like "explore" widget on top (instead of internal metrics jargon, which easily happens)

Thank you, all good feedback. I also want a breadcrumb kind of thing, so I'll think about how to add that.

We tweaked the numbers a bit and we're still thinking about breadcrumbs: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178018

On Commons, it's extremely useful to be able to distinquish between uploads and other types of edit. Huge bot-upload projects and heavy-duty uploading contributors can significantly obscure the longer-term trends in community editing. Would it be possible to include especially for Commons data a simple toggle to include/exclude upload-type edits (essentially those that create a new File: page) ?

If we can dig this out of the data, I'm more than happy to add it to breakdowns. I'm not familiar enough with how consistently the File: namespace is used accross wikis. If it's not consistent, we'd have to special case Commons. That's fine, we have other special-case requests for Wikisource and others. But it probably won't happen in the first release, since we want to get something out as fast as possible.

Ok, that's fine. I suspect that Commons may be a special case in that uploads to other projects won't be numerous enough to mess up the community-editing statistics, but if it's easier technically easier to have a global option to include/exclude edits that create a new File: page that would work.

Captured here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178017

This very interesting task posted on the Analytics team points out that we know very little about how different wikis deal with Flagged Revisions: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44360

This seems like the kind of thing we could add to Wikistats in a future iteration, but I agree that we should do so as soon as possible. Some more detail on exactly what reports would be useful would be great.

Captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177951, a subtask of the original task mentioned.

This was the main point of confusion on the first round of feedback, how the breakdowns would work. You can explore this in the prototype on the [https://analytics-prototype.wmflabs.org/#/contributing/active-editors Active Editors metric]. Toggle the breakdown button and check/uncheck the various checkboxes. You can also change the graph type to "table" and see the same thing. Does this work the way you'd expect or is it still confusing?

I could "intuitively" understand it (before reading this).

The only thing I found difficult is that categories like "lightly active" seem rather opaque to me, and even if I could read what it means I would be much interested in seeing small multiples of histograms or any other standard visualization of more raw data than predefined categories.

I assume it was a conscious decision to make the different sections of a metric mutually exclusive. I'm not sure yet whether I like it, but for sure it's different than Wikistats 1.0 Could that raise any confusion? In Wikistats 1.0 the figure for 5+ editors does include the 100+ editors.

I did not mind it being mutually exclusive (this is rather what I expected knowing histograms etc.); My concern was that I was unsure what "lightly active" actually means and that I got a predefined splitting point to the next data bin (which would be medium active, or something like this)

This is, indeed, not something we're fully decided on how to handle. With mutually exclusive breakdowns we have the flexibility to show 5+ or 5-100 as we wish. So we're writing the back-end this way and then we are planning two interfaces. One is the one you see, and we're aiming for "easy to understand". And another is a flexible "big table" that we hope can handle most of the big table use cases possible in Wikistats 1.0. In that scenario, you will be able to get 5+ editors and any other kind of metric you might be interested in, and save bookmarks for it.

Captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177950

I can see that with the availability of very attractive and data-rich graphs, users are going to want to embed them as clickable images in non-article namespaces such as user pages, WikiProject pages, help pages, discussion venues and the like. Would it be possible to provide some sort of new interwiki link that could be used to pull up a specific stored version of a graph at a variable size? This would of course display just the graph itself, and not the remainder of the webpage that the user would see when viewing the same graph on the main statistics site.

Something like [[SpecialNewLink1234 | thumb | right | 250px]].

Either the graph could update automatically when the page is loaded or - as that may be too slow - some OnClick-type mechanism could be provided to allow users to force an update as needed.

I understand that that may be one for further down the line.

I feel strongly that this should exist, but so far it's been the Graph extension that provides this functionality: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph. We can work together to make some templates that hook up Graph extension graphs to the new API we're building (there are already pageview API-consuming graph templates so it won't be very hard).

The graphs themselves on wikistats will be bookmark-able, but to embed them we'd have to duplicate functionality with the Graph extension, so that one needs more thought. One of my longer term goals at the foundation is to shift more focus on rich content creation, like Yuri described in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik/I_Dream_of_Content. But that's outside the scope of the Analytics team.

Captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178016

Hey Dan and team - this is really nice and thanks for reaching out to us for feedback! I had some thoughts:

• it seems like the current display doesn't have room for annotations, whether they be related to technical changes (like definitions), anomalies, or external events (we rolled out a new feature, a country blocked Wikipedia, etc). This seems like an important thing to have room for to me.
• I think the bot/not bot distinction could be made clearer, particularly for pageviews, where the default assumption of 3rd party users is that bots are automatically excluded. Excluding bots should be the default behavior and noted somewhere
• It seems like definitions of the various editing types would be really useful as well.
• Some breakdowns that are valuable to external users that I don't see here: mobile/desktop, country
• Question: is there room in the design to eventually accommodate new metrics that we want to promote as top-level health metrics, like visit frequency and time spent on site?

Circling back to make sure we address everything:

• opened a task for annotations - thanks for the reminder
• we're talking over a change to exclude bots by default (just whether or not we should be able to toggle it back on if someone wants to see total pageviews)
• there's a task to add labels and definitions of all the breakdowns and terms that don't make any sense to anyone but us https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177950
• mobile/desktop is there now, country has its own "map" task that we're doing later, but in the meantime Erik's new country visualization is pretty awesome :)
• Totally room in the design for all kinds of metrics. We have 9 top level metrics which we could customize per-wiki or per-project-family if we wanted. I think the metrics currently there are kind of boring and we can change them with new hotness, I'd prefer that. And the topic selector is always there to switch to any metric.

I was wondering why on the stats homepage (https://stats.wikimedia.org/), Wikispecies is filed under "Other projects". It appears to be the only major project that doesn't have its own standalone tab.

I can't speak to that, just to say that in Wikistats 2.0 we don't really differentiate projects yet. We may start differentiating by features available (for example I know Wikisource wants to report certain page stats in a different way due to the way content is structured there).

It seems to me like at the present there are new statistics available for Wikidata. The old statistics hosted at https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaWIKIDATA.htm#editor_activity_levels are offline but the new one's aren't yet online.

When will I be able to look at statistics again?

At the moment, the new Wikistats interface is being developed and we should have a basic version with very few metrics up within a month or so. Over the next three months we will work on the API that will serve the rest of the statistics, and plugging these into the front end. In the meantime, Erik Zachte may choose to update the old statistics if he's able to. However, there may be slight delays in this timeline because two key members (myself included) are expecting babies this summer. Hope this helps.