>Basically, to capture only people who already have a Wikimedia-cookie, and count those. Ah, yes, now I get it.
Yes. We have done these calculations and they under report by quite a bit cause you need two visits to wikipedia to have a cookie (cookie is set on your first visit, sent back on the 2nd visit) so as you said you will miss all 1-hit visits in a monthly period, for example. Whether this matters depends on user's browsing patterns, it turns out that 1-hit visits make up quite a significant part of our traffic. On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 11:22 AM, Denny Vrandečić <[email protected]> wrote: > +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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