Thanks Mark, Gergo & Fabrice for the answers ! This helps a lot.
I'd like to develop this point :
Would there be a possiblity to have fancy stats at a
finer level? Like,
> how many times File:Example.jpg was enlarged ? (awesome for GLAM partners)
> Currently, though I do not think it is
widely used, it is possible to see
how popular a file is based on the page-views of
its file description -
using Henrik's service [1]. (And as usual, Magnus made an awesome tool to
query that data for an entire media collection ^_^). It can be interesting
especially for use cases like GLAM partnerships.
With MediaViewer, I expect that these figures will go down a lot - users
just wanting to view the file in a higher resolution will have what they
want without needing to browse to the file description page on Wikimedia
Commons.
So as a media contributor to Wikimedia Commons, I want to know how much my
file is viewed through MediaViewer ;-)
Also, here is a long wanted dream-feature request - being able to track how
much a file/media collection is reused outside of Commons. Having data on
MediaViewer usage of "Download" or "Reuse" would be incomplete but
could
provide a nice approximation.
We specifically don't store information like what image was loaded, because
with a little magic we could use that information in
conjunction with
others to determine what a user was looking at at any given time. We were
unhappy with this idea, so we deleted [1] loads of information from the
schema we're using [2].
These are serious concerns indeed... Any chance data could be anonymised or
the magic exorcized so we could have both privacy-repect and awesome data?
I agree with Mark that we cannot track how often they actually share or
embed a file, but at least we can find out if users
seem interested in this
feature.
And if we can track it, I suppose we could A/B test to see which
formulations seem to make more sense to users ? ;-)
Thanks a lot for engaging in this discussion - I appreciate it a lot!
[1] Eg. <
http://stats.grok.se/commons.m/201402/File:Fran%C3%A7ois_Hollande_%28Journ%…
--
Jean-Frédéric