Topic on Talk:XTools

Deployed

First of all, thank you for providing such a versatile tool. The German language Wikipedia community are discussing the provision of a deep link to the Authorship section of the Page History tool right now, to be displayed alongside every article. Should the vote come to pass, I would expect to see an increased load on the Page History tool in a few weeks' time. So I hope that there is some caching mechanism.

I would like to ask for a change in the Authorship section. Right now, the rendering of the pie chart takes only the percentages of the first ten contributors into account. If an article has a long tail distribution of contributors, this gives the wrong impression. The top ten contributors to the article Angela Merkel have contributed less than 40% of the current total to the article. Yet the pie chart makes it look as if the #1 contributor has contribued more than a quarter to the article, not 11.7 %. Could you please change the rendering of the pie chart so that the remaining other contributors (lower ranked than #10) get one collective slice of the pie, being as large as their combined total? This pie section could be gray, as this connotes lack of detail. In the Angela Merkel example, this slice of the pie would be 61.5 %, or about two thirds. The ten named top contributors would get proportionally smaller slices.

Thank you! (PS: I am not sure whether I get a feedback or ping through this site, so if you want to contact me, better try my de:WP talk page.)

Hey! There is a dedicated page you could use to show authorship information, e.g. https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo-authorship/de.wikipedia.org/Neaira%20%28Hetäre%29 . This will show all contributors, however there are caveats (a) limited to 10 colours, which repeat. (b) I will soon limit it to the top 500 editors or so, because if there are more it sometimes fails to load. I assume this is not a problem for you.

At any rate, yes for the main Article Info page where we only show the top 10 contributors, we can add a slice for the remaining contributors, as you suggest. I'll look into implementing this soon.

Thanks for the suggestions!

This has been deployed. Example: https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/de.wikipedia.org/Angela%20Merkel#authorship, and the dedicated authorship page: https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo-authorship/de.wikipedia.org/Angela%20Merkel (chart may be at the bottom depending on your screen size). Thanks again for the recommendations.

Hello MusikAnimal, a big thank you for the change and incredibly fast deployment. The changed graphic is exactly as I had hoped for. Your work has been well received by the authors in de:WP discussing this topic.

@Minderbinder My great pleasure :) Regarding caching -- unlike the rest of XTools, the Page History tool actually doesn't cache most data (phab:T208543). This is a caveat of its implementation. However we can easily cache the authorship stats. So my question for you is if it would suffice to link only to the dedicated authorship page, e.g. https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo-authorship/de.wikipedia.org/Angela%20Merkel, and not the full results? This would be faster for you, and less strain on the XTools servers. If the community wants the full Page History results, that is okay too :) Most of the time it will be no problem, but any high-traffic page such as your Village Pump may be very slow to process or fail entirely.

Another thing I wanted to mention: While I greatly appreciate the praise, the authorship stats you see are fetched from a third-party service called WikiWho. Their superb algorithm provides around 95% accuracy. They should get full credit for this :)

Finally, take note of the path-style URL format that XTools uses. Basically, your link should not replace spaces with + signs ("Foo+bar"), instead use normal percent-encoding like "Foo%20bar". If you are using the {{urlencode:Foo bar}} parser function, just use {{urlencode:Foo bar|PATH}}. The other option is to pass in the page title via query string, e.g. https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo-authorship/de.wikipedia.org?page=Foo+bar.

@MusikAnimal Thank you for your helpful implementation hints. I will not be changing the GUI to include the link myself, that is left to a group of interface-admins. The formal vote on this change runs until May 8. Though there is currently a 3:1 majority for providing the deep-link to your statistics, it would be premature to discuss implementation details right now. I will point the interface-admins to this discussion after the vote has been tallied.

I like the idea of a dedicated authorship page, both to enable caching and to avoid information overload. Can I make a suggestion though: In the non-dedicated section (i.e. https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/de.wikipedia.org/Angela%20Merkel#authorship) the table is cut-off after the tenth contributor, in line with the pie chart. The contributions from rank 11 on are summarized with one line, providing number of remaining contributors and their total contrbution in terms of characters and percentage. That is not the case for the dedicated page (i.e. https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo-authorship/de.wikipedia.org/Angela%20Merkel ), which renders the table with a different cut-off at rank #500. That makes for a very long page, and effectively prevents the viewing of the pie chart when smaller (mobile) screens are used. Who is going to scroll down 500 lines? Besides, for most articles the lower ranked contributions can be for something as mundane as inserting a wiki link etc. So I would suggest to bring the cut-off of the dedicated page in line with the section of the main page. The last line with contributors from rank 11 should be expandable, so if someone clicks on it, a full table should be rendered. This would also help with chaching, I imagine: Each authorship stats page would have to hold about 24 data items only.

On Wikiwho: I am all for giving credit where credit is due, so I will look into contactiing them.