+Wikimedia Analytics <[email protected]> Thanks for pointing me to the list, I should have written there in the first place.
Sorry, with "user agent" term, I didn't mean the actual user agent string, but rather what you are trying to express with "unique device" - i.e. the different browsers on a single mobile device. I should have just stayed with your terminology to make it less confusing. Basically, to capture only people who already have a Wikimedia-cookie, and count those. This would still underreport - as it would miss all that only came once - but not by too much, I'd think. Right now I am more worried about overreporting. I hope this is a bit clearer. On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 11:16 AM Nuria Ruiz <[email protected]> wrote: > Denny: > > Best list to ask these kinds of questions is analytics@ (cc-ed). > > >A minor question - could you also count the number of unique recurring > user agents per month? I.e. the number of visits that return and have a > still valid cookie (e.g. by >marking the cookie after the count). > mmm...Not sure what you mean by "recurring" as you can have thousands of > people with the same user agent, right? Think "everyone in Seattle with an > iPhone and the latest OS using Safari" . You can add other pieces of info > like IP, but in mobile and due to NAT-ing [1] that can also mean a group of > thousands of people. So it will always under-report heavily the number of > unique devices if you use "recurring user agents" as base for your main > calculation. > > Now, I might be missing something as your question is brief, maybe you can > elaborate a bit more ? > > > >I am worried that the current number, due to the freshness offset might > be overreporting > Since the offset calculation takes IP into account when looking for > freshness and it only keeps devices having 1 event without cookies and 0 > with cookies the calculation is likely to under-report in mobile, due to, > again, NAT-ing and user agents being shared among many devices. We see this > on our data as smaller offset numbers in mobile projects than desktop > projects. Now, this methodology might over report for a user that uses many > distinct IPS, same browser, does 1 request and clears cookies after every > session, now this is a far less often a common of a scenario. > > Hopefully this makes sense. > > > >Again, congratulations on the work! I am really happy to see the WMF not > being dependent on a commercial traffic numbers provider anymore! > Many thanks for reading! > > > > > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation > > > > > > > > > > > > > > On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 10:30 AM, Denny Vrandečić <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Hi Nuria, Aaron, >> >> first congratulations on the Unique devices work! I am really impressed >> by the solution and the dataset. I am looking forward to the visualizations >> that will come out from this. >> >> A minor question - could you also count the number of unique recurring >> user agents per month? I.e. the number of visits that return and have a >> still valid cookie (e.g. by marking the cookie after the count). >> >> My reasoning is the following: knowing well that it would possibly >> further underreport the number of unique user agents, it would get rid of >> all user agents that clean their cookies out or that use some form of >> incognito mode. It would only count people who have been there, got a >> cookie, returned, and then we mark the cookie, and don't count them further >> until it expires. >> >> I am worried that the current number, due to the freshness offset [1], >> might be overreporting, and I do not agree fully with your reasoning in >> that page that this is OK. Counting only the recurring ones would clean >> that up, give a more reliable number, although it would potentially >> underreport the people who indeed only come once a month (a number I don't >> expect to be too large). >> >> It would be interesting to see these two numbers side by side. >> >> Again, congratulations on the work! I am really happy to see the WMF not >> being dependent on a commercial traffic numbers provider anymore! >> >> Cheers, >> Denny >> >> >> [1] >> https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Unique_Devices/Last_access_solution#How_big_of_a_percentage_does_the_offset_represent_from_the_total.3F >> >> > >
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