Like Nuria said: this is unique devices, not unique people. Many people in the Global North use more than one device to access Wikipedia (desktop, tablet, phone).
Also I'd like to add a caveat: any long term change will have to factor in that this ratio of devices owned per user isn't fixed over time. Erik Zachte -----Original Message----- From: Wikitech-l [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gergo Tisza Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 22:54 To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. Cc: Wikimedia developers; Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] [Analytics] Unique Devices data available on API Very interesting, thank you! Do you have any estimate of how much this overcounts? I checked the monthly uniques for huwiki <https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/hu.wikipedia.org/all-sites/monthly/20160301/20160331>, and it's about 5.8 million, which is a bit higher than the total number of internet users in Hungary (estimated to 5.2 million). This Gemius analyis <http://www.gemius.com/all-reader-news/is-wikipedia-still-popular.html> from a year ago claims a 30% reach for Wikipedia, which would be about 1.5 million. They use a software panel (a demographically representative group of volunteers who installed tracking software) so they might be inaccurate (and they only count traffic originating from Hungary I think) but probably not by a factor of four. On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 9:17 PM, Nuria Ruiz <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello! > > The analytics team is happy to announce that the Unique Devices data > is now available to be queried programmatically via an API. > > This means that getting the daily number of unique devices [1] for > English Wikipedia for the month of February 2016, for all sites > (desktop and > mobile) is as easy as launching this query: > > > https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/en.wikipedia. > org/all-sites/daily/20160201/20160229 > > You can get started by taking a look at our docs: > https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Unique_Devices#Quick_Sta > rt > > If you are not familiar with the Unique Devices data the main thing > you need to know is that is a good proxy metric to measure Unique > Users, more info below. > > Since 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation used comScore to report data > about unique web visitors. In January 2016, however, we decided to > stop reporting comScore numbers [2] because of certain limitations in > the methodology, these limitations translated into misreported mobile > usage. We are now ready to replace comscore numbers with the Unique Devices > Dataset . > While unique devices does not equal unique visitors, it is a good > proxy for that metric, meaning that a major increase in the number of > unique devices is likely to come from an increase in distinct users. > We understand that counting uniques raises fairly big privacy concerns > and we use a very private conscious way to count unique devices, it > does not include any cookie by which your browser history can be tracked [3]. > > > [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices > [2] [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ComScore/Announcement > [3] > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#How_do_we_coun > t_unique_ > devices.3F > > > _______________________________________________ > Analytics mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics > > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
