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wikimedia / popularpages

Tool for generating popular page reports for WikiProjects
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tool:Popular_Pages
MIT License
2 stars 3 forks source link

Add WikiNav to report #20

Closed Sadads closed 2 years ago

Sadads commented 3 years ago

So the research team at the Wikimedia Foundation recently produced: https://wikinav.toolforge.org/ -- it would be really great to add this as an additional link/column for the sources of traffic for each of the articles. All that would be required is to put a link with the pagetitle name in the url i.e. https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Climate_change_in_Nepal

Sadads commented 3 years ago

@MusikAnimal -- I suspect this isn't too complicated, but let me know.

MusikAnimal commented 3 years ago

Very cool! Indeed it should be fairly simple to add this. The only issue is Popular Pages is meant to work on any wiki, so I guess we'll need to hardcode the list of wikis supported by WikiNav, but that's simple enough. Right now the report only runs on English but will soon run on Arabic.

I can also add a link to WikiNav on pageviews.toolforge.org. You will get a lot more traffic from that than from the Popular Pages reports.

MusikAnimal commented 3 years ago

So WikiNav only reports data from the previous month, is that correct? I guess that's why you only recommended it for Popular Pages. If there's no way to give it an arbitrary date range, maybe it's not fit for Pageviews Analysis (otherwise users could be confused), but it could still be listed on the monthly Topviews report.

Sadads commented 3 years ago

Yeah, it only runs on historical data right now -- Martin Gerlach and folks are working to make it more of a service I think, but the visualizations are only useful once you hit a certain threshold of volume.

MusikAnimal commented 3 years ago

Do you know how often it updates? I see it is still showing data for August 2021, while pageview data for September is now available. My only concern here is expectations from users. Either coming from Topviews or from Popular Pages, they might expect data within the same time frame.

It also doesn't seem to work all the time, for instance https://wikinav.toolforge.org/?language=en&title=Hanksy. I'm guessing any page with low pageviews probably is missing clickstream data (for privacy reasons), hence why you're only interested in advertising this tool for popular pages?

Another thing to note: Popular Pages reports pageviews for the target page + all of its redirects. So users will most always get different numbers for the "actual number of incoming pageviews" in WikiNav. Not a big deal, but the discrepancy could be misleading.

Sadads commented 3 years ago

I think we would have to ask the Research team it's supposed to be about once a month I think -- not sure if it would be a good connection to pageviews -- and yeah it's aggregated across the month for privacy reasons.

martingerlach commented 2 years ago

@MusikAnimal trying to answer some of your questions on WikiNav:

Let me know if you have further questions. Thanks in advance for giving visibility to this tool (potentially); let me know how I can be of help.

MusikAnimal commented 2 years ago

@martingerlach That all makes sense to me. Thanks for the detailed reply!

@Sadads I am certainly fine with the concept of adding a link to WikiNav in the report, but there are a few issues. First, per privacy reasons that Martin explained, WikiNav will apparently not work for many pages that are listed in Popular Pages reports. I worry people will be confused by that, and bug reports will come in on CommTech's plate.

The bigger issue right now is that the bot also runs on Arabic Wikipedia, and that is not supported by WikiNav (yet). So we'd need to conditionally show it for English Wikipedia only. This kind of logic is not something I think belongs in the bot's code, which is meant to be wiki-agnostic. Instead, I'm thinking we could introduce something akin to interface messages, whereby each community (enwiki in this case) can customize the links for themselves. Perhaps even we could have customization on a per-WikiProject basis, so we can remove the links for smaller WPs whose articles don't receive a lot of traffic and hence wouldn't benefit from WikiNav.

In lieu of a Phabricator project for Popular Pages bot, I've created a new GitHub issue at #21 to implement the above idea. I will have to be honest though, I am currently swamped with other work as is Community Tech, so I feel this may be low-priority at this point. At any rate, I think the ability to customize the links is a great idea and worthwhile, when time allows to implement it. I've added a "help wanted" tag to the issue in the off-chance a volunteer (or either of you) wants to take a stab at it. I hope this is satisfactory for now, and apologies I can't do more at the moment!