The Web team has analytics questions the answers to which will guide the future development of features for readers, the vast majority of whom are anonymous (not logged in).
For starters, what would be useful is some means of understanding if a page view came from a very heavy reader, an occasional reader, or an advanced reader. The definitions of each of these categories of users could be based on the number of articles they read in a given window and the kinds of pages they interact with (Talk Pages, etc.).
A larger list of such questions:
- In Africa on French Wikipedia on mobile devices, during the month of August, how many of our readers were each of "one-off", "occasional", "regular", "heavy", and "informed" readers?
- Across all Wikipedias, what percentage of our pageviews came from each reader type? Broken out further by referrer?
- Did a given new feature affect the number of "one-off" users (or any other category of users) in any way?
To proceed, the following is required:
- Agree on how this can be implemented.
- Obtain a privacy review.
- Obtain a legal review.
- Discuss with communities.
- Build out the instrumentation support required.
It is likely that no new instrument will be introduced due to these needs, even if existing metrics may need to start including an additional dimension that enables us to break down various metrics by their reader categories. One example if this is if we wanted to break down session lengths (an existing metric) by reader category.