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Run a Synthetic A/A/A test (JS + PHP SDKs, Minerva only)
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Description

The purpose of this experiment is to investigate an imbalance we're seeing in Reader Growth's Mobile ToC A/B/C test by replicating their setup to help us isolate the source of the imbalance.

The experiment does not need to be long, 2-3 days will do because we're seeing the imbalance at 48 hours since the experiment went live.

Experiment design

  • Traffic allocation (same as https://test-kitchen.wikimedia.org/experiment/mobile-toc-abc)
    • Arabic Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia: 10 %
    • English Wikipedia: 0.1 %
  • Variations
    • Control (control)
    • Treatment A (treatment-a)
    • Treatment B (treatment-b)
  • Duration
    • 3 days

Instrumentation

Client-side instrumentation should be gated and loaded by server-side as in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/extensions/ReaderExperiments/+/4ac24c2c57c860bd280709e24228fb534e4c4a6f/src/Hooks.php#259 with certain events being limited to specific groups via ResourceLoader modules that are then loaded dynamically via server-side assignment checking.

Like the mobile ToC experiment, all instrumentation should only be loaded for Minerva skin as determined via server-side check.

EventSent for
action: "page_visit"All 3 groups
action: "module_loaded", action_context: "control"control only
action: "module_loaded", action_context: "treatment-a"treatment-a only
action: "module_loaded", action_context: "treatment-b"treatment-b only

Event Timeline

mpopov triaged this task as High priority.

Change #1247741 had a related patch set uploaded (by Clare Ming; author: Clare Ming):

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@master] Add synthetic AAA experiment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1247741

Set up experiment in TK - https://test-kitchen.wikimedia.org/experiment/minerva-experiment-aaa

Once https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen/+/1247741 is merged, I'll backport it to 1.46.0-wmf.17 later today and once that's done, update the experiment to start thereafter.

Change #1247741 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@master] Add synthetic AAA experiment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1247741

Change #1248080 had a related patch set uploaded (by Clare Ming; author: Clare Ming):

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.17] Add synthetic AAA experiment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1248080

Change #1248081 had a related patch set uploaded (by Clare Ming; author: Clare Ming):

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.18] Add synthetic AAA experiment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1248081

Change #1248081 abandoned by Clare Ming:

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.18] Add synthetic AAA experiment

Reason:

wrong cherry pick

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1248081

Change #1248081 restored by Clare Ming:

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.18] Add synthetic AAA experiment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1248081

Change #1248081 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.18] Add synthetic AAA experiment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1248081

Change #1248080 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/TestKitchen@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.17] Add synthetic AAA experiment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1248080

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-03-04T21:27:11Z] <tgr@deploy2002> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1248081|Add synthetic AAA experiment (T418614)]], [[gerrit:1248080|Add synthetic AAA experiment (T418614)]]

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-03-04T21:29:14Z] <tgr@deploy2002> cjming, tgr: Backport for [[gerrit:1248081|Add synthetic AAA experiment (T418614)]], [[gerrit:1248080|Add synthetic AAA experiment (T418614)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can now be verified there.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-03-04T21:36:22Z] <tgr@deploy2002> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1248081|Add synthetic AAA experiment (T418614)]], [[gerrit:1248080|Add synthetic AAA experiment (T418614)]] (duration: 09m 11s)