Talk:Wikistats 2.0 Design Project/RequestforFeedback/Round2

How does the site look and feel now that you can interact with it?

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 14:48, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

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) Jan Dittrich (WMDE) (talk) 08:36, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, all good feedback. I also want a breadcrumb kind of thing, so I'll think about how to add that. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:14, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

We tweaked the numbers a bit and we're still thinking about breadcrumbs: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178018 Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Do breakdowns make more sense when you can see the graph change?

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? Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 14:50, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

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. Jan Dittrich (WMDE) (talk) 08:45, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

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. Erik Zachte (talk) 16:49, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

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) Jan Dittrich (WMDE) (talk) 14:19, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 11:52, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177950 Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:10, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Level of granularity?

After a quick look around the prototype (very pretty!), I'm left with the question: what use will this be for sub-communities within a project?

That is, as an editor on English Wikipedia, I don't really care about its 5 million total articles and the gazillion active editors (most of whom appear to be engaged in philosophical debates on Jimbo's user talk page), but I do care about what's going on in my little corner of it (w:WP:BARD WikiProject Shakespeare). How will Wikistats 2.0 let me answer how many active editors there are working on my WikiProject's articles; the most viewed and edited articles within its scope; the number of edits over time on those articles; etc.? On English Wikisource this might be scoped either by a WikiProject, or by a particular set of authors. In other settings the scope might be defined by a category, or a set operation (sum, intersection, exclusion, etc.) on categories.

Overview stats at the project level like those on the current dashboard prototype, or cross-project (wiki) comparison, is far too coarse a level to useful for actual editors. Stats at that level are mostly interesting to Wikimedia management and press; all actual editors will be interested in lower levels of granularity. For instance, I would be interested in stats scoped to a WikiProject on enwiki combined with stats scoped to a category on Commons. All-project stats (totals for a wiki) for Commons would be at best a curio, and of very little actual use to me.

Or if I occasionally lift my head a little, and wonder about the health of the movement, I might be wondering how many people are editing actual content pages (an enwiki article) vs. navelgazing in Wikipedia:-space (judging by my Watchlist, enwiki editors spend most of their time on WikiDrama in Wikipedia:-namespace pages, but it'd be nice to have real metrics for this). Or what's the distribution of edits between Talk: and mainspace for a given article?

Anyways, my point is that the current direction appears to be aiming for too coarse a level of granularity to be useful to actual editors, and if this is so you might want to reassess it.

Cheers, Xover (talk) 06:01, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Directly, we'll track this work here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T163113 Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 15:18, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Xover, thanks for the perspective. Before I answer, it's important to note that the current prototype is coarser than we envision our first draft. When we fully flesh out all of our metrics, we will have some of the namespace breakdowns you're talking about.

That said, we are first aiming for feature parity with the existing wikistats: stats.wikimedia.org, and that doesn't yet go as deep as Wiki Projects and categories. We do want to go that deep, just not at first. And I should point out that while it's true the larger communities have many sub-communities, this first level of granularity is hopefully relevant to the smaller wikis that are just taking off.

For the larger communities, our next annual plan includes "the community backlog". In my mind this is a way to look at any and all work being put into the wikis by our different communities. I would love to get more detail from you about the examples you give. Scoping by WikiProject, cohort of authors, or category sets sounds like a great start. Any in-depth detail you can provide on this will be super-useful in design that's going on right now for the back-end API that will send Wikistats data. We can bake in these ideas now, even if just in concept, and implement them in a few months.

We're dedicated to the idea of being relevant to each and every member of the community and giving them relevant information that helps with their work. I'm not super excited about proving or disproving how much drama is going on, on different talk pages :) I hope we keep this positive and aimed at what we all want: sharing the sum of all knowledge. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 14:46, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

I find myself, too, often being most interested in very specific questions/cross correlations to answer design questions or check assumptions. However, I am not familiar with the old wikistats well nor do I know if to check hypothesis like "The more experienced a community member is, the more they use talk pages" or the like is the purpose of the tool. Jan Dittrich (WMDE) (talk) 08:42, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Non-flow talk

I am not comfortable using Flow, so I have left some feedback on Wikistats 2.0 Design Project/RequestforFeedback/Round2/Non-flow talk --Base (talk) 19:57, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

I've added my feedback there as well. Snowolf ^{How can I help?} 17:38, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Unstructured design feedback

Thanks for sharing the evolved designs, already promising! Here a few minor nitpicks based on the screenshots/the prototype:

• Color contrasts are on various places lower than necessary, not conforming to WCAG 2.0 level AA:
  • Footer links
  • `.subdued` class
  • Tags ”Top Contributors” et al.

Please refer to the WikimediaUI Style Guide or the WikimediaUI color palette for guidance.

• For UI components you should consider taking efforts of learnings from the OOjs UI widgets development, as examples:
  • The icon position of the Wiki Selector UI isn't clear for me. It doesn't seem to be an action button, at least not from the prototype, but the end position is indicating this.
  • Also the selected element of a menu lists is well defined in the designs and implementation. The check on the right is again a very unique UI pattern Volker E. (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Geographic breakdowns

Will geographic breakdowns be available? Chico Venancio (talk) 14:34, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, only for some metrics at first. Some geographic breakdowns are problematic for user privacy, so we are looking at those carefully and releasing data only if safe. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Choose a Wiki field should be a combobox

At first I thought I would be able to type in "plwiki", but it seems there are only a few options. I see in the design for this element there are more options. Still it would be usefull to show at least main projects (Wikipedia, Wikitionary) after a user click (like in the design or with a more traditional drop down). I think traditional combobox would be most usefull here (possible to type in options, but also to choose them from dropdown).

Note that showing options would allow users to see in which format you expect intput... And there are quite a lot forms that can be used: plwiki, pl.wiki, wiki-pl, pl.wikipedia, Wikipedia-pl, Polish Wikipedia... Nux (talk) 21:42, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. Yeah, this one was kind of hard to prototype exactly like it is in the design but with fake data. We'd parse the sitematrix and provide as many of these options as possible. Kind of more similar with how the project selectors work on this dashboard: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/vital-signs where you can type "English" or "Wikipedia" or "enwiki", but structured the way the design has it. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

search box?

The demo has what looks like a search box which isn't actually a search box, it's a dropdown. Very confusing to me. ~ Stuartyeates (talk) 09:38, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes – though I could easily use it, I even referred to it as "search box" already in conversations already (On the other hand, with many metrics to choose from it might make sense for it to be more like a search box and at least allow text input to get suggestions) Jan Dittrich (WMDE) (talk) 08:47, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Do you mean the Wiki search box or the Explore Topics one? In the wiki one you can select and erase the text and search with auto-complete, we'll make that more obvious in the real version. In the Explore Topics one, you're right, I should've made that auto-complete too. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 11:55, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

For me it was the "Explore Topics" box. Long input field and right hand "go"-button makes it a bit search-y, I assume. Jan Dittrich (WMDE) (talk) 07:56, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Ah! Sorry, yes, that's totally supposed to be a search box in the final version, it's just like this now for the prototype. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 08:44, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

ORES scores

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 ~ Smallbones (talk) 14:51, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:12, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Captured here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178019 Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:22, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

What exactly is Lightly Active Editors?

Is it 1+ edits per month, or 3+?

Just in case the answer is 1+. As I explained in mailing lists (and am happy to expound on here) I find it hard to support the idea that a person with just one edit is even called an an editor. Just like a person who writes one word or even sentence per month isn't called a writer. Words lose their meaning if they comprise such fringe cases.

I'm note sure 3+ adds much of a new perspective. We've been consistently using 5+ and 100+ thresholds for so long, without ever much controversy, which says a lot in Wikimedia context ;-) Erik Zachte (talk) 17:58, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I think we were thinking 3-4 (since 3+ would be inclusive), I agree with you about 1+. These breakdowns are the least finalized part of the data model. We're aiming them mostly to satisfy quick lookups and we're hoping the more advanced table interface (not designed yet) will cover everyone's needs. I think we should revisit the breakdowns once we figured out what that big table thing looks like. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:17, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Aren't we going with canonical/consolidated definitions? Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:51, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

We have a hard task of combining multiple conflicting definitions and making use of richer data. The canonical definitions will be available at least in the advanced table view. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:38, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

On abbreviations

Here is a very minor poinr. To me '2015 Apr Jul Oct' as in https://analytics-prototype.wmflabs.org/#/contributing works better than 'D J F M A M J J A S O N D'.as on the dashboard. Even month numbers would work better. Maybe this is a matter of taste.though. Erik Zachte (talk) 19:37, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree AMJJASOND is likely to be confusing to anyone but the most astute English speakers. Hm... maybe roman numerals so it stands apart from the other numbers on the chart? Problem is there's not a lot of space under those charts. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:19, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Roman numerals are really, really horrible and non-intuitive! MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:06, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, hard problem then... How about localized month abbreviations? Vertical text? Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:30, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Either localised abbreviations or month numbers, I think MichaelMaggs (talk) 15:55, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Alignment of lists

Some article names are really long. How about switching name and number at https://analytics-prototype.wmflabs.org/#/reading/most-viewed-articles and have numbers right aligned. So there won't be much white space between short names and numbers. Erik Zachte (talk) 19:40, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Works for me, will do. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:19, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Edits v uploads on Commons

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) ? MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:43, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:21, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

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. MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:03, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Captured here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178017 Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:13, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Quick link to an on-wiki view

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. MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:35, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 12:35, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178016 Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:10, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Line graphs versus bar charts

So we do not forget we want to make sure we use line graphs rather than bar charts where it pertains in real application. We have couple examples with real data in which trends are much harder to spot in bar charts. 75.172.114.50 (talk) 16:52, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Misc feedback

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? Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 19:00, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:05, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Provide Statistics on Flagged Revision Status

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 13:51, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Captured in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T177951, a subtask of the original task mentioned. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:11, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

Maybe update banner?

The one at the top of https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, in addition to only sending people to previous round, is probably not as effective as it focuses on the May 2016 date. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:07, 9 May 2017 (UTC)

Sadly the banner is dynamically generated and present on hundreds of pages, so it's hard to change manually. And Erik is on leave, and we don't know how to re-build Wikistats with the old perl scripts without messing things up. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 08:48, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

I just checked, the banner is present on 17000+ pages (dynamically generated). Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 09:02, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

That's ok. I probably only really meant the main "Statistics per Wikimedia project" ones. But you know that if you need more people we can find different ways to make it happen. Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:24, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Availability of statistics

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? ChristianKl (talk) 19:02, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 18:30, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Project listing

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. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 23:57, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

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). Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 17:11, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

We're getting ready to release an alpha

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. Milimetric (WMF) (talk) 23:21, 11 October 2017 (UTC)