Investigation card to learn what's involved in a top 10 wish. More info coming soon.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Miscellaneous#Pageview_Stats_tool
Let's talk to community members and Analytics and come up with specific requirements for a pageview stats tool.
Question: Would creating an "official" implementation of http://stats.grok.se/ be adequate for most use cases or are other features needed? For example, mobile vs desktop views, comparing articles, aggregating by week/month, etc.
----
The original survey proposal states:
> Wikipedia uses the old stats.grok.se that should be patched to be used correctly from the other wikis. Several bugs have been highlighted long time ago, but no one took them in charge.
>On the other hand recently has been developed wikiviewstats that is a more complete and flexible, graphic tool. Unfortunately, it has been stopped, and no one was able to take it back on track.
>I suppose that should be quicker to fix the above issues instead of writing from scratch a brand new stats tool able to monitor the accesses of any articles (fundamental to understand the visitor's insterests), however any of the two choices would be a good improvement.
Several of the proposal comments ask for an "**official, WMF-maintained tool**".
==== A look at [stats.grok.se](http://stats.grok.se) ====
- Pros: Simple to use & straightforward UI, provides json stats dumps (such as http://stats.grok.se/json/en/200910/Michael_Jackson) for people who want to fetch data programmatically
- Cons: Does not provide mobile view stats, does not provide stats for sister projects (although these stats are included in the raw data dumps - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Killiondude/stats#Are_sisterprojects_included.3F), doesn't allow custom date range filtering, cannot compare page views for multiple pages, does not take into account redirect hit statistics
==== Possible solutions to this problem ===
1. Patching stats.grok.se and/or wikiviewstats:
- Pros: Already established and widely liked tools
- Cons: Overhead of working with legacy code, almost everything would need to be changed (down to the api being called for data), [dashiki](https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Dashiki) is the new preferred way of doing these stats as it makes it easy to embed these graphs in other tools - Analytics is planning to rebuild stats.wikimedia.org and would likely want to embed these page view stats in there
2. Having an extension with a Special page:
- Pros: On-wiki data as preferred by a lot of the community
- Cons: It would limit us displaying stats on per-wiki basis, extra overhead of having the extension deployed on every wiki.
3. Creating a new tool on Labs:
- Pros: Ability to experiment with UI and features, ability to use dashiki
- Cons: Will need to work from scratch
After weighing all pros and cons and discussions with Analytics folks, creating a new tool feels like the best decision.
==== Basic features for this tool ====
1. Uses [dashiki](https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Dashiki) to display graphs.
2. Custom date-range filter.
3. Ability to view stats by day, week, month, year
==== Nice to have features ====
1. Internationalization for the tool (preferably using TranslateWiki)
2. Ability to switch between different kind of graphs
3. Ability to get Top X viewed pages by namespace on a wiki
4. Ability to compare different pages (over different wikis or same)
From discussion with CE folks:
1. Ability to compare view vs edit stats
2. Ability to see cumulative stats for a page for all the languages it exists in
3. Ability to see cumulative stats for a page and its subpages
4. Ability to see page views by category ([http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/treeviews/](http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/treeviews/))
5. Top 10/100 most-viewed/most edited articles and similar fun stats (like [this](http://top.hatnote.com) and [this](http://weekly.hatnote.com/))
6. Compatibility with PagePile ([http://tools.wmflabs.org/pagepile/](http://tools.wmflabs.org/pagepile/))
7. Ability to differentiate stats between WMF staffers and other users.
==== For inspiration ====
1. https://analytics.wmflabs.org/demo/pageview-api/
2. {F3239800} Wikiviewstats (now defunct)
3. http://stats.grok.se
----
I will keep updating this as I have follow-up conversations with CE folks.
Notes from meeting with Jan: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/pageview-stats-tool