New subject: [Wiki-research-l] Fwd: Traffic to the portal from Zero providers

6 May 2015

Cross-posting to research and analytics, too!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Oliver Keyes &lt;okeyes(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
Date: 6 May 2015 at 13:11
Subject: Traffic to the portal from Zero providers
To: wikimedia-search(a)lists.wikimedia.org

Hey all,

(Throwing this to the public list, because transparency is Good)

I recently did a presentation on a traffic analysis to the Wikipedia
"home page" - www.wikipedia.org.[1]

One of the biggest visualisations, in impact terms, showed that a lot
of portal traffic - far more, proportionately, than traffic to
Wikipedia overall - is coming from India and Brazil.[2] One of the
hypotheses was that this could be Zero traffic.

I've done a basic analysis of the traffic, looking specifically at the
zero headers,[3] and this hypothesis turns out to be incorrect -
almost no zero traffic is hitting the portal. The traffic we're seeing
from Brazil and India is not zero-based.

This makes a lot of sense (the reason mobile traffic redirects to the
enwiki home page from the portal is the Zero extension, so presumably
this happens specifically to Zero traffic) but it does mean that our
null hypothesis - that this traffic is down to ISP-level or
device-level design choices and links - is more likely to be correct.

[1] http://ironholds.org/misc/homepage_presentation.html
[2] http://ironholds.org/misc/homepage_presentation.html#/11
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T98076

--
Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

-- 
Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation