[Engineering] How we count uniques

Tue Apr 5 06:31:42 UTC 2016

Thanks to Ori for calling out this great work and thank you Nuria, Madhu
and Aaron for writing up about your approach - it's written in a easily
accessible way even for a non-tech :-).

I'm grateful to see good work happening and good work letting the world
know it's happened!

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 2:35 AM, Nuria Ruiz <nuria at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> >Since the blog specifically called out not making our users log in, and
> so not being able to count "users", are we looking how many logged in users
> access our sites each >month (whether they make an edit or not), and
> average number of devices per user account?
> As Madhu mentioned this data will require us to instrument login code as
> logeed in/out info is not availble via webrequest logs.  Shouldn't be hard
> to do.
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 12:15 PM, Madhumitha Viswanathan <
> mviswanathan at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Ori, Anna and Chris :)
>>
>> Since the blog specifically called out not making our users log in, and
>>> so not being able to count "users", are we looking how many logged in users
>>> access our sites each month (whether they make an edit or not), and average
>>> number of devices per user account?
>>
>>
>> The webrequest logs are unaware of whether or not users are logged in. So
>> I don't think we can get that number from any of the analytics data - as
>> far as I know. As far as average number of devices per user account - Since
>> we don't really track who the user is in our logs, and only have ips, user
>> agents, and access-methods - I assume we could draw rough estimates but
>> they would be highly inaccurate.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Chris Steipp <csteipp at wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Kudos to the Analytics and Research team for doing that!
>>>
>>> Since the blog specifically called out not making our users log in, and
>>> so not being able to count "users", are we looking how many logged in users
>>> access our sites each month (whether they make an edit or not), and average
>>> number of devices per user account?
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 8:21 AM, Anna Stillwell <
>>> astillwell at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Very cool. Novel solutions that work well and are in line with our
>>>> values are cool.
>>>>
>>>> Congratulations to everyone involved.
>>>>
>>>> /a
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 11:11 PM, Ori Livneh <ori at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Madhu, Nuria, and Aaron from the Analytics and Research teams have
>>>>> written a blog post on how we are able to measure the reach of the projects
>>>>> without tracking users. The technique we use is novel, as far as I know,
>>>>> and it has already allowed us to quantify and understand the shift from
>>>>> desktop to mobile better than we could before. So I want to congratulate
>>>>> the three authors and the rest of the analytics team, as well as encourage
>>>>> you to read the post, since it makes for very interesting reading. :)
>>>>>
>>>>> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/03/30/unique-devices-dataset/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Engineering mailing list
>>>>> Engineering at lists.wikimedia.org
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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Anna Stillwell
>>>> Director of Culture and Collaboration
>>>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>>> 415.806.1536
>>>> *www.wikimediafoundation.org <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>*
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> --Madhu :)
>>
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>
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