On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 5:23 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <[email protected]>wrote:

> Fabrice Florin, 15/03/2014 00:13:
>
>> We would appreciate your advice on our upcoming research study of image
>> load times on Media Viewer. [...]
>> *I. Goals*
>> The goal of this study is to determine whether or not Media Viewer is
>> loading images fast enough for the majority of our users in most common
>> situations.
>>
>> As a typical user of the Media Viewer, I want images to load quickly, in
>> just a few seconds, so I don't have to wait a long time to see them. [...]
>>
>> Definitions: [...]
>> *II. Questions* [...]
>>
>> *III. Outcomes* [...]
>>
>
> I'm confused. Too many questions, too many arbitrary definitions, axioms.
> No falsifiability. I understand the idea of defining a minimum quality
> standard to respect, it might even be the only way, but it's a thicket that
> moreover only indirectly verifies what we're actually interested in.
> At its root is simple, we need to know if readers enjoy the images/media
> more or get annoyed and don't look at them because they're too slow.
> (Measuring the value they get from the media, or attach to the page in
> consequence hence becoming more likely to visit the project more, is less
> clearcut.) So maybe there is some simple check for this, if surveys don't
> work maybe just the total number of requests or something.
>
> Nemo
>

(Cross-posting to multimedia list since I think my reply there was bounced.)

Hey Federico,

I hope you'll forgive me for some shameless (but brief) thread-jacking that
won't answer any of your questions but instead raise a couple of tangential
points. Apologies for the derail.

I regret not being subscribed to the multimedia list (a mistake I plan to
rectify immediate after sending off this e-mail) and thus not having had
the chance to respond sooner. I haven't yet had a chance to review the
results, but I did have a chance to closely review the instrumentation code
that the Multimedia team devised for collecting these measurements, and I
can tell you that it is extremely sophisticated, making use of a web
performance API, the specification of which has graduated to W3C
recommendation status *last month*. I don't know yet if any errors were
made in the statistical sampling and aggregation of data (and I want to be
careful not to suggest that there have been any), but I do want to stress
that this represents a major technical achievement and that I think we will
glean a lot of insight about the performance of multimedia content on
Wikimedia wikis from this infrastructure for years to come. So, kudos for
that!

---
Ori Livneh
[email protected]
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