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[SPIKE] Determine mobile talk page usage volume needs
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Description

T297448 articulates the analyses we are planning to conduct [i] to evaluate the impact of the set of mobile talk page improvements we are developing. T295180 helped us understand the number of distinct people editing talk pages using the mobile site each month.

This task involves the work with identifying the number of people who use mobile talk pages each month that will be required to complete said analyses such that the results are significant and timely.

Open questions

  • 1. How many unique people using talk pages each month do we think will be required in order to for the two impact analyses we have planned (T298058 + T298065) to yield significant results in a timely manner?
  • 2. How many unique people using talk pages each month do we think will be required in order to for the A/B test we have planned (T298062) to yield significant results in a timely manner?

Decision to be made

Answering the ===Open questions above will help us to decide what wikis we seek to partner with (T296357, T94609) to improve mobile talk pages.

Done

  • Answers to all ===Open questions are documented

i. T298058, T298065, T298062


Reference

Talk pages project/Wiki selection contains the set of 8 wikis we are approaching to partner with us on the development and design of mobile talk page improvements. These eight wikis are:

  1. Arabic Wikipedia
  2. Bengali Wikipedia
  3. French Wikipedia
  4. Hebrew Wikipedia
  5. Japanese Wikipeida
  6. Korean Wikipedia
  7. Vietnamese Wikipedia
  8. Chinese Wikipedia

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@ppelberg See my current recommendation below regarding the mobile talk page volume needed to complete the planned DiscussionTool on Mobile analyses. Let me know if you have any questions.

Method: To determine the scope required for these analyses, I reviewed the average monthly talk page contributors for each wiki and estimated the proportion of those users we might expect to use one of the available DiscussionTool features (around 14.8% of users) in a given month. This percent is based on trends seen on wikis where the Reply and New Discussion tool are available as opt-out on desktop. I also took into consideration the volume of events used in previous AB Tests and the planned scope of each DiscussionTools on Mobile analysis.

  1. How many unique people using talk pages each month do we think will be required in order to for the two impact analyses we have planned (T298058 + T298065) to yield significant results in a timely manner?

If we only include the planned 8 partner wikis, that would be about 2480 talk page users per month. An estimated 368 of these users would use at least one of the deployed discussiontool features once in a given month. That should be just sufficient to complete the planned prep and post deployment analyses across all partner wikis.

However, there may not be sufficient data to be able to confidently identify trends on a per wiki basis. For the partner wikis with a smaller number of talk page contributors, such as viwiki, we may only see 19 or fewer distinct talk page users complete an edit with one of the deployed DiscussionTools features in the reviewed timeframe. That will likely not be sufficient to identify any pre and post-deployment changes within that particular wiki.

If possible, I'd recommend adding at least one or two more partner wikis with higher average monthly talk page contributors to the partner list (I'd recommend wikis with 200 or more average monthly mobile talk page users if possible). This would increase the overall amount of data available to review and also provide more wikis that have sufficient data to identify any per wiki trends in usage.

  1. How many unique people using talk pages each month do we think will be required in order to for the A/B test we have planned (T298062) to yield significant results in a timely manner?

We would need to make sure to include different wikis for the AB test than the partner wikis used for the T298058 + T298065 analyses. There should ideally be at least 2000 total unique people using talk pages each month across all selected partner wikis.

In addition, I'd recommend expanding the number of partner wikis in this test. In the AB Test, we can account for the effect of the wiki on the success probability of a Junior Contributor completing an edit, which will allow us to more accurately understand the effect of the Mobile DiscussionTools. The more distinct wikis we are able to include in the test, the more data we will have to account for the effect of each wiki. For reference, we used a set of 15 partner wikis in the Reply Tool AB Test, which was sufficient for the analysis.

Smaller wikis can be included but, if we want to make any per wiki conclusions, I'd recommend including at least four or five partner wikis with over 200 unique talk page users each month.

@ppelberg See my current recommendation below regarding the mobile talk page volume needed to complete the planned DiscussionTool on Mobile analyses. Let me know if you have any questions.

This is great – comments and one follow questions for you in response to the considerations you raised, in-line below...

  1. How many unique people using talk pages each month do we think will be required in order to for the two impact analyses we have planned (T298058 + T298065) to yield significant results in a timely manner?

If we only include the planned 8 partner wikis, that would be about 2480 talk page users per month.

Question: To be doubly sure: does the *2,480* number above include people who are logged out?

An estimated 368 of these users would use at least one of the deployed discussiontool features once in a given month. That should be just sufficient to complete the planned prep and post deployment analyses across all partner wikis.

Noted. I've added a note to T282638 to hold us accountable to meeting this scale threshold prior to deployment. See T282638#7685125.

However, there may not be sufficient data to be able to confidently identify trends on a per wiki basis. For the partner wikis with a smaller number of talk page contributors, such as viwiki, we may only see 19 or fewer distinct talk page users complete an edit with one of the deployed DiscussionTools features in the reviewed timeframe. That will likely not be sufficient to identify any pre and post-deployment changes within that particular wiki.

Understood. While I think it would be ideal for us to be able to draw conclusions about each of our partner wikis individually, I think five out[1] of the eight wikis we plan to partner with being large enough to do this kind of analysis is sufficient.

  1. ar.wiki, bn.wiki, fr.wiki, ja.wiki, ko.wiki,

If possible, I'd recommend adding at least one or two more partner wikis with higher average monthly talk page contributors to the partner list (I'd recommend wikis with 200 or more average monthly mobile talk page users if possible). This would increase the overall amount of data available to review and also provide more wikis that have sufficient data to identify any per wiki trends in usage.

Understood. I've added a note to T294609 to hold us accountable to seeing if there is another wiki with >200 people using Mobile web talk pages each month. See: Wikipedia Monthly Talk Page Contributors.

  1. How many unique people using talk pages each month do we think will be required in order to for the A/B test we have planned (T298062) to yield significant results in a timely manner?

We would need to make sure to include different wikis for the AB test than the partner wikis used for the T298058 + T298065 analyses. There should ideally be at least 2000 total unique people using talk pages each month across all selected partner wikis.

Understood; I've added the "2,000 total unique people" and "15 distinct wikis" requirements to the A/B test ticket (T298062) in T298062#7685131.

Also, I think we should be able to meet these requirements considering the are enough people using mobile talk pages at wikis that we do not plan to work with as partners as part of this project:

wiki~avg. number of people using mobile talk pages/month*
de.wiki~340 people
en.wiki~3,500 people
es.wiki~525 people
fa.wiki~740 people
it.wiki~315 people
pt.wiki~380 people
ru.wiki~400 people
total~6,200 people (~2,700 people excluding en.wiki)

*source: Wikipedia Monthly Talk Page Contributors

In addition, I'd recommend expanding the number of partner wikis in this test. In the AB Test, we can account for the effect of the wiki on the success probability of a Junior Contributor completing an edit, which will allow us to more accurately understand the effect of the Mobile DiscussionTools. The more distinct wikis we are able to include in the test, the more data we will have to account for the effect of each wiki. For reference, we used a set of 15 partner wikis in the Reply Tool AB Test, which was sufficient for the analysis.

Smaller wikis can be included but, if we want to make any per wiki conclusions, I'd recommend including at least four or five partner wikis with over 200 unique talk page users each month.

Understood. I've added the requirements above to the A/B test ticket (T298062) in T298062#7685136.

Question: To be doubly sure: does the *2,480* number above include people who are logged out?

@ppelberg No this only accounts for logged-in users. We do not have an accurate count of distinct logged-out users that edit Talk Pages on mobile based on current instrumentation.

If we decide to include logged-out users from those wikis as well, we can look at adding an anon token to identify these users in the test but don't have data to currently confirm the number of estimated logged-out talk page users each month on those wikis.

Question: To be doubly sure: does the *2,480* number above include people who are logged out?

@ppelberg No this only accounts for logged-in users. We do not have an accurate count of distinct logged-out users that edit Talk Pages on mobile based on current instrumentation.

Understood.

If we decide to include logged-out users from those wikis as well, we can look at adding an anon token to identify these users in the test but don't have data to currently confirm the number of estimated logged-out talk page users each month on those wikis.

Per the discussion @MNeisler and I had today, it is likely that we'll need to analyze the behavior of logged out users as part of the analyses we have planned.

Although, as Megan noted, no further instrumentation is required to analyze logged out user behavior considering we already implemented this as part of https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/748157.