Analytics/Research and Data/status

Last update on: 2014-04-monthly

2013-08-monthly
 In August, we attended WikiSym and Wikimania. Dario Taraborelli gave a keynote address on actionable Wikipedia research at WikiSym, where several other Wikipedia research papers were presented. At Wikimania, we hosted two sessions focused on Wikimedia data and analytics tools. We also worked with Platform engineering this month on analyzing and visualizing HTTPS failure rates by country, in preparation for the switch to HTTPS as a default. We released new dashboards for the launch of notifications on 5 other Wikipedias and continued to provide ad-hoc support to teams in Editor Engagement. Last, we continued screening and interviewing candidates for an open research analyst position. 

2013-09-monthly
This month, Aaron Halfaker joined the research team as a full-time employee. We started to reorganize the team structure and engagement model in coordination with the Analytics developers. We performed a survival analysis of new editors in preparation for new experiments led by the Growth team, and worked with the team to iron out the data collection and experimental design for the fortcoming iteration of GettingStarted.

We worked with product owners to determine the initial research strategy for features with key releases scheduled for the next two quarters (Mobile Web, Beta Features, Multimedia, Flow, Universal Language Selector, Content translation). We started a cohort analysis of conversion rates for mobile vs desktop account registrations; the results will be published on Meta shortly.

We drafted a proposal to host tabular datasets in a dedicated namespace and solicited feedback from interested parties (particularly the Wikidata community). We also started fleshing out the Labs2 proposal, an outreach program for academic researchers and community members, launched at Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. We co-hosted the second IRC research office hours and prepared for the first Wikimedia research hackathon, an offline/online event to be held in various locations worldwide on November 9, 2013.

Last, we contributed to the September 2013 issue of the Wikimedia research newsletter.

2013-10-monthly
This month, we continued to support Growth and Mobile as the team's focus areas for this quarter. We published the results of the latest GettingStarted test run by the Growth team, we completed the cohort analysis for Mobile user acquisition and we worked with the Mobile team to prepare the launch a new test for new user activation, currently underway.

We analyzed active editor trends to determine whether the Wikipedia total active editors data for September 2013 (~67k) represented an anomalous change from seasonality and the long-term trend, and concluded that this was not the case. The results of this analysis call for the need to apply time series analysis and forecasting methods to other key performance indicators that the Foundation publishes on a daily or monthly basis.

We continued to work with the analytics engineers to provide requirements for Wikimetrics (with a particular focus on UserMetrics feature parity), and to perform data QA and validate the output of the application for metrics that were recently implemented.

We completed a round of consultations with internal stakeholders to identify research needs of each team in the organization and determine their priority. We presented a review of our activities for Q1 and plans for Q2 at the Analytics Quarterly meeting. We identified "metric standardization" as one of the goals the team will focus on in this quarter.

We organized and announced the inaugural Wiki Research Hackathon, a global event hosted in 8 locations in 5 countries, bringing together Wikimedia researchers, academics and community members to work on wiki research projects. The hackathon — the first event organized in the context of the Labs2 initiative — will take place on November 9, 2013.

2013-11-monthly
This month, we started work on metrics standardization, one of the team's quarterly goals. We published a number of supportive analyses of new user acquisition, activation and retention as well as "active editors" to assess issues and potential benefits of new definitions. The outcome of this analysis will inform design decisions for new dashboards focused on editor engagement.

In collaboration with the Platform team, we ran an A/B test to determine performance gains of localStorage. The results indicate that the use of localStorage significantly improves the site's performance for the end user: Module storage is faster. Readers whose pages load slower tend to browse less. Mobile browsers don't seem to benefit substantially from caching.

We published the results of a test designed to explore if displaying a short tutorial could improve the first-edit completion rate of newly-registered users on mobile devices. The results support the hypothesis, indicating that edit guiders are a good onboarding strategy for new mobile users.

We ran an analysis of anonymous editor acquisition as background research for new onboarding strategies designed by the Growth team and found that editors who edit as an IP right before registering an account are our most productive newcomers.

On November 9, 2013 we hosted the inaugural Labs2 Wiki Research Hackathon: it was the first in a series of global events meant to "facilitate problem solving, discovery and innovation with the use of open data and open-source tools" (read the full announcement). Highlights from the event are available in the latest issue of the Research Newsletter. We are planning to host a new hackathon in Spring 2014 and we are actively [mailto:wrh@wikimedia.org seeking] volunteers to host local and virtual meetups.

2013-12-monthly
This month, we kicked off a series of monthly research showcases as an opportunity for the team to share what we're learning about Wikimedia editors and projects, and new features and programs the Foundation is rolling out. Aaron Halfaker presented research on anonymous editors. The first showcase was targeted at an internal audience but we're considering making future showcases open to anyone via a public stream.

We analyzed the cause and impact of major over-reporting on page views in the last months of 2013. We filtered bogus traffic from the data, and published updated reports.

We also continued work on metrics standardization and presented the rationale for this project and the results of the initial round of analysis we conducted.

This month also saw the completion of the third volume of the research newsletter, which this year covered a total of 196 publications reviewed by volunteer contributors. A retrospective of research covered in the newsletter in 2013 will be published later in January.

2014-01-monthly
We conducted a thorough review of traffic data and trends and confirmed a downward trend in desktop pageviews in 2013. This trend is not reflected in desktop unique visitors or mobile traffic. We are working on complementing pageviews with other traffic metrics that will help us better monitor readership trends. We engaged with external parties (Google and comScore) to obtain data about referral and mobile traffic respectively.

We completed research on article creation trends on the largest Wikipedias and found substantial differences between different language Wikipedias; specifically, where anonymous editors are allowed to create articles, their success rate (% of articles kept) is substantially higher than that of newly registered editors. We also found that articles that started as Articles for Creation (AfC) and userspace drafts have a near 100% success rate, but the transition that English Wikipedia made toward directing newcomers to start AfC drafts appears to have substantially reduced the amount of successful articles created by newcomers, presumably due to the large review backlog.

We published an update on Visual Editor usage on Wikipedia projects where the editor is enabled by default.

We continued work on metrics standardization for the editor engagement vital signs project and published supportive analysis on definitions and parameter exploration for two proposed standardized user classes: new editor and productive new editor.

We worked with the Analytics Development and Legal teams to articulate use cases and the retention and anonymization strategy for data subject to the retention guidelines, in particular with respect to user agents.

We welcomed Sahar Massachi as a research contractor supporting the team with data analysis for fundraising tests and iterated on new modeling strategies for estimating test success (such as the number of dollars per banner impression). Before he joined us, Sahar worked with the fundraising team, where most recently he focused on writing tools to help the team easily and quickly understand the results of each test.

2014-02-monthly
 This month, we welcomed Leila Zia as the newest addition to the team. Leila joins the Foundation as a research scientist after completing a PhD in management science and engineering at Stanford University. Her work will initially focus on modeling editor lifecycles to better understand what affects their survival and retention.

We hosted the first public Research and Data showcase, a monthly showcase of research conducted by the team and other researchers in the organization. This month, we presented two studies on Wikipedia article creation trends and on the measurement of mobile browsing sessions. The showcase is hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation and live streamed on YouTube every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 11.30am Pacific Time.

We attended the 17th ACM Conference on Computer-supported cooperative work and Social Computing (CSCW '14) in Baltimore. Research on Wikipedia and wiki-based collaboration has been a major focus of CSCW in the past, and this year three Wikipedia research papers were presented. We hosted a session to discuss collaboration opportunities for researchers interested in tackling problems of strategic importance for Wikimedia (a detailed CSCW '14 report will follow on wiki-research-l).

We started creating public documentation for data sources and tools used by the team for research and data analysis and porting docs previously hosted on internal wikis (for example: analytics/geolocation).

We continued to provide ad-hoc support to various teams at the Foundation and worked closely with the Growth and Mobile teams to prepare and review results for their respective quarterly reviews.

2014-03-monthly
 This month we concluded the first stage of work on metrics standardization. We created an overview of the project with a timeline and a list of milestones and deliverables. We also gave an update on metrics standardization during the March session of the Research and Data monthly showcase. The showcase also hosted a presentation by Aaron Halfaker on his research on the impact of quality control mechanisms on the growth of Wikipedia.

We published an extensive report from a session we hosted at CSCW '14 on Wikipedia research, discussing with academic researchers and students how to work with researchers at the Foundation.

We submitted 8 session proposals for Wikimania '14, authored or co-authored by members of the research team.

We attended the Analytics team's Q3 quarterly review during which we presented the work performed by the team in the past quarter and our goals for the upcoming quarter (April-June 2014).

We completed the handover of Fundraising analytics tools and knowledge transfer in preparation for a new full-time research position that we will be opening shortly to support the Fundraising team.

We continued to provide support to teams in focus area (Growth and Mobile) with an analysis of the impact of the rollout of the new onboarding workflows across multiple wikis; an analysis of mobile browsing sessions and ongoing analysis of mobile user acquisition tests. We also supported the Ops team in measuring the impact of the deployment of the ULSFO cluster, which provides caching for West USA and East Asia.

2014-04-monthly
<section begin="2014-04-monthly"/>This month we kicked off work on mobile traffic metrics. We presented a plan for modeling and implementing these metrics, in coordination with the Analytics Dev team. Oliver Keyes gave an update on pageview data for desktop, mobile web and apps at the monthly metrics meeting.

We continued to provide support for the Vital Signs project by working with the Dev team on metrics and code requirements, as well as visualization and data presentation options.

Aaron Halfaker presented his work on Snuggle – an observation and mentoring system for new Wikipedians – at the 2014 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14).

We published longitudinal data on editor activation and mobile vs desktop new user acquisition across the largest Wikipedias.

We posted a job opening for a full-time Research Analyst to support Fundraising and become part of our team.

We started work on the editor lifecycle and editor trajectories, with the goal of understanding the drivers of active editors and power editors and modeling the survival of contributors to WIkimedia projects.

We provided ad-hoc support to the Product team for the onboarding of the new Executive Director.

This month we also released tools to perform analysis of Wikimedia data. Aaron Halfaker published a Python library called mediawiki-utilities for extracting and processing data from MediaWiki installations, slave databases and xml dumps. Oliver Keyes released WikipediR, an R wrapper for the MediaWiki API, aimed particularly at the Wikimedia 'production' wikis, such as Wikipedia.<section end="2014-04-monthly"/>