Hello all,
The Discovery team recently updated the
Wikipedia.org
<http://wikipedia.org/> portal page by moving all inline JavaScript into a
separate file in order to analyze the amount of incoming traffic that use
JavaScript-friendly browsers. This information is very important to our
team, as we endeavor to make the portal page more interesting and user
friendly for all our visitors.
The results were very encouraging - here's the executive summary from
the analysis
document
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analysis_of_Wikipedia_Portal_Traffic_and_JavaScript_Support.pdf>
that
can also be accessed from the Wikimedia Discovery page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery#Wikipedia.org_Portal_Page>
:
*On 5 February 2016 we deployed a patch to the Wikipedia Portal moving the
inline JavaScript into a separate file, which enabled us to finally measure
the proportion of traffic with JS support separate from the overall traffic
to the Portal. This report covers logs of HTTP request from 5 Feb to 10
Feb, 2016. *
*Overall, 93% of the requests made to the Wikipedia Portal have JS support.
However, a large component (45%) of this overall percentage is accounted by
traffic from United States, which has an overall proportion of 96%. The
remaining 55% of the traffic from 234 other countries show a lot of
variation in JS support, with 86.5% on average. *
*We also performed an analysis of browser usage and learned that approx.
75% of the traffic comes from users with relatively modern browsers, with a
few exceptions such as Internet Explorer 8 (3.2% of total traffic). Of
those 17 browsers, 14 had populations with more than 93% JS support. That
is, less than 7% of those browsers’ users had turned off JavaScript for
privacy/bandwidth/other reasons. Interestingly, only 80% of Opera Mini 7
traffic and 60% of Android 4 / Chrome Mobile 30 traffic had JS support.*
Please let us know if there are any concerns or questions!
Cheers,
Deb
--
Deb Tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation