Analytics/Research and Data/status

Last update on: 2013-10-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.