As WMF staff, I want to be able to identify pageviews/visits originating with a shared link so that we have a durable (i.e., post-experiment) way of knowing how many readers find wiki projects via sharing and can prioritize future work accordingly.

References:

• webrequest documentation https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_Platform/Data_Lake/Traffic/Webrequest
• from referrer header https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:HTTP_referer

Report

Goal

• use the wprov URL query parameter to indicate that a text-fragment URL comes from the Share Highlight feature
• extract relevant traffic from webrequest by looking for the reserved x_analytics_map.wprov value

Approach

• paste the following 4 text-fragment URLs with ?wprov=shhu0 in an etherpad:
  • https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia?wprov=shhu0#:~:text=DBpedia%20%C3%A8%20un%20progetto%20nato,Open%20Data%20in%20formato%20RDF.
  • https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia?wprov=shhu0#:~:text=DBpedia%20est%20un%20projet%20universitaire%20et%20communautaire
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia?wprov=shhu0#:~:text=DBpedia%20(from%20%22DB%22%20for%20%22database%22)%20is%20a%20project
  • https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBpedia?wprov=shhu0#:~:text=DBpedia%20(DB%20%E2%80%93%20baza%20danych)%20%E2%80%93%20projekt%20maj%C4%85cy%20na%20celu%20usystematyzowanie
• click on them
• wait for the relevant refine hourly job
• check webrequest

from wmfdata.spark import create_session
spark = create_session(app_name='shh-referrers')
q = """SELECT
  referer,
  referer_class,
  uri_host,
  uri_path,
  x_analytics_map.wprov AS wprov
FROM
  wmf.webrequest
WHERE
  year = 2026
  AND month = 4
  AND day = 17
  AND hour = 14
  AND http_status = 200
  AND x_analytics_map.wprov = 'shhu0'
  """
ddf = spark.sql(q)
ddf.show(truncate=False)

+-------+-------------+----------------+-------------+-----+
|referer|referer_class|uri_host        |uri_path     |wprov|
+-------+-------------+----------------+-------------+-----+
|-      |none         |fr.wikipedia.org|/wiki/DBpedia|shhu0|
|-      |none         |pl.wikipedia.org|/wiki/DBpedia|shhu0|
|-      |none         |en.wikipedia.org|/wiki/DBpedia|shhu0|
|-      |none         |it.wikipedia.org|/wiki/DBpedia|shhu0|
+-------+-------------+----------------+-------------+-----+

Takeaways

• the URL's text fragment doesn't seem to be stored
• there's nothing we can do if the source platform isn't referred. We'll get a - value, Etherpad is an example
• wmf_raw.webrequest holds non-refined data, perhaps worth a look