Hi Nuria,

As I understand it, in Safari and Chrome with the default settings, there
is a native browser feature that, when searching through the address bar
(Google powered) by default silently starts loading the url of the top
result shown below the address bar. Maybe there's a way we opted out, but I
think it applies to Wikipedia as well.

I'm replying privately because I didn't understand the last part of your
email, and maybe we are saying the same thing :)

-- Timo



On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 14:14, Nuria Ruiz <[email protected]> wrote:

> > I think that's for the Page Previews feature (i.e., when a user hovers
> over a link on desktop Wikipedia) or
> > its corresponding feature in the the Wikipedia for Android (triggered by
> default on link tap)
> The code that Fran pointed to only discounts "previews" by Android app as
> we stablished that convention a while back. Page previews (hovers over
> wikipedia links that display a short popup) are not counted as pageviews at
> all at this time.
>
> >By "prefetching", I meant X's Wikipedia page shows up in the search
> results and the browser prefetches/preloads the search results but I do not
> click on X's Wikipedia page. If so, the >pageview data seem to over-count
> the number of visits to X's Wikipedia page.
> This functionality needs to be implemented by the client (it is not
> automagically implemented by the browser) and it is not implemented on
> Wikipedia. Searches trigger requests to the API, that return pageview urls,
> not pageview prefetches. You can follow these workflows on the dev tools of
> the browser you might be using. chrome://net-export/ is a new addition to
> the toolset that gives you a readable dump.
>
> >Are you saying that browser-based prefetch activity (e.g., with resource
> hinting like https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-hints/ ) is also tagged the
> same way?
> No. Browser prefetches cannot be tagged, they are initiated by the
> browser. Wikipedia's pages do not do any prefetches and or pre-renderings
> of content using those directives as far as I can see. dns-prefetches are
> done for two domains: login and meta, neither of which counts as a pageview
> cause a dns prefetch does not receive an http response. Just instantiates a
> connection and resolves TLS if any. Prefetches might be indicated by a
> standard set of headers like "Link:" in the future (this would be initiated
> by the browser) but that seems on the works.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nuria
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 9:43 AM Adam Baso <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Fran, the preview to which you refer, I think that's for the Page
>> Previews feature (i.e., when a user hovers over a link on desktop
>> Wikipedia) or its corresponding feature in the the Wikipedia for Android
>> (triggered by default on link tap) and Wikipedia for iOS (force press)
>> apps, is that right? Are you saying that browser-based prefetch activity
>> (e.g., with resource hinting like https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-hints/
>> ) is also tagged the same way?
>>
>> Chenqi Zhu, I think what you're suggesting is the possibility that
>> browsers might be issuing HTTP prefetches for Wikimedia-hosted pages and
>> that could inflate pageviews. I'm not sure, but have you happened to
>> observe user agents making prefetches when resource hinting (
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-hints/ ) is absent? I'm not sure how
>> often, if at all, discovery platforms like search engines are actually
>> placing resource hints into markup (which is mostly deterministic as far as
>> browser behavior) for Wikimedia content...nor to what degree there might be
>> heuristics being used for prefetching independently of any resource hints.
>> Do you have any data or field observations to help clarify?
>>
>> Browser settings allude to this sort of behavior (e.g., in Chrome,
>> there's "Use a prediction service to load pages more quickly", which is
>> described at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/114836 ), although
>> I think without digging into browser source code it's a bit hard to know
>> for certain what's going on "under the hood". We do use preconnect and
>> prefetch semantics and the like in different contexts (cf.
>> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/G2tr8i0YZii9 ,
>> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/.dtx_hqaj3wj , ...there
>> may be more).
>>
>> -Adam
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 11:00 AM Francisco Dans <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Chenqi,
>>>
>>> You can find out more about what constitutes a pageview in its Metawiki
>>> article:
>>>
>>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Page_view#Definition
>>>
>>> As you can see, one of the conditions is whether the request being
>>> examined is a preview or not, in which case it is not counted as a page
>>> view. Hope this helps!
>>>
>>> Fran
>>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 5:30 PM Chenqi Zhu <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>>
>>>> I am trying to better understand the pageview data. I have a quick
>>>> question. I apologize if the question has been asked or it is so naive.
>>>>
>>>> If the web browser prefetches a Wikipedia page, does it count as one
>>>> pageview in the pageview data? By "prefetching", I meant X's Wikipedia page
>>>> shows up in the search results and the browser prefetches/preloads the
>>>> search results but I do not click on X's Wikipedia page. If so, the
>>>> pageview data seem to over-count the number of visits to X's Wikipedia 
>>>> page.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks in advance for any insight.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Chenqi Zhu
>>>> New York University
>>>> 44 W 4th St., Suite 10-185(B),
>>>> New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> *Francisco Dans*
>>> Software Engineer, Analytics Team
>>> Wikimedia Foundation
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