If a user opens a file page, it's counted as a pageview and appears in the pageviews tool.
If a user opens an image in MultimediaViewer, is it counted as a pageview?
Pinging some people who might know: @Neil Shah-Quinn (WMF), @JAllemandou (WMF), @Mforns (WMF).
Hey @Amire80, good question! When a user opens an image in MultimediaViewer, the browser makes a request to upload.wikimedia.org for a larger image and some requests to the Action API for image metadata. According to the pageview definition, none of those requests count as pageviews. In particular, they fail the test of their URLs containing "a 'content' directory (mainly /wiki/, but also /zh-hant/ or another language variant directory)".
On the other hand, the request to upload.wikimedia.org would be counted in the Mediacounts dataset. That dataset has been available internally for some time, and the Analytics team has just started doing public releases.
Thanks!
The reason I'm asking is that a GLAM institution asked me how can they check how many of the images they upload are actually viewed, and they are interested in both file description page views and Multimedia Viewer views, which makes a lot of sense.
Do you have an idea where can they get it? The mediacounts page, to which you linked l, doesn't make it entirely clear where can one get it publicly, but maybe I'm missing something.
I'd actually say that it should be included in the same dataset as the usual pageviews, perhaps with some properties that indicate a different medium, because most people who upload images and want to know how often are they used, probably want to get info about all pageviews.
Does the availability section of the mediacounts page answer your question? It says the dataset is publicly available as daily TSV dumps, and privately available in Hive. Unfortunately, that means it will be very hard for that institution to get an answer to their question; I think Analytics is working on a public API which will make it possible to build something similar to the pageviews analysis tool, but I don't know when it will arrive.
You're welcome!
And if you're just concerned about giving this institution a one-time answer, you could fairly easily run a Hive query and give them the results; let me know if you need any advice about that. But if you're more concerned about the general issue of GLAMs having access to media view data, of course that wouldn't scale.
