Infodisiac

Three months ago I blogged about mobile traffic to Wikipedia. I explained how we track two different metrics: on one hand traffic to our mobile site, on the other hand traffic from mobile devices (as detected from the so called agent string).

While preparing my presentation for Wikimania Haifa, which shows a visualization of  global page views (more on that soon),  it dawned on me that the chart I presented in that earlier blog actually shows incomparable metrics. They are not wrong, but a comparison of apples and oranges.

Above is the updated plot. Both existing lines are unchanged. I added a new line.

The issue is this: the blue line shows the ratio of page views to our mobile site, based on page views only, aka html requests. At the present our mobile site serves 6% of our page requests. (BTW read more on recent plans to redirect even more traffic to our mobile site).

The red line shows the ratio of requests that originate from a mobile device (to any of our sites), based on all traffic: not only html requests but also images and script files. There is a caveat here: many handheld clients (app/browser) do not retrieve a full Wikipedia page, but only the html file, and just a few of the images and scripts files. This skews the ratio, and not a little bit!

The new purple line shows the ratio of page views from handheld devices, disregarding all non-html file types.  The difference is striking. It turns out at least 15% of our page views comes from mobile devices.  I say at least as we do not factor in API calls yet, my colleague Nimish Gautam thinks this might further drive the ratio upward (to be continued).

It is not possible to generate the new metric for traffic activity older than 3 months. WMF only keeps request logs for a short period due to privacy considerations. Although somewhat confusing without this explanation, I will keep the red line for a while, to allow for long term trend assesments.

Today I present a new animated visualization of Wikipedia edits.

>> Animation <<   >> Screenshots <<

It shows all edit events for all Wikipedia’s on one random day. Currently this is 14 February 10 May 2011. On that particular day all Wikipedia’s combined had been edited 369,384 times.

The visualization grabs all those edits (time, location and language code) and shows how these were spread over the globe. You can see the distribution over space and time in an animation. You can also see static maps: bubble maps and heat maps, either per major language or for all languages combined. For bubble maps: large bubbles correspond to many edits, done from the location at the center of the bubble. For heat maps: bright colors correspond to many edits from that particular spot. Bubbles help you quickly focus on areas of large activity, heat maps have better resolution.

You can zoom and pan (mouse), click on the map for latitude and longitude (only when zoomed out), change the animation speed (5x-30x), toggle between color and black&white map (latter with country borders), show/hide the position of the sun, city names and approximated local times, and change event marker type and size (types are circle, fixed or animated language code). You can cycle through major languages  (easiest with space bar), fast forward the clock by 1 hour, or pause the animation. Type H for Help on all options and their associated keys.

Screenshot. Click image to see larger version..

Privacy

Two measures were taken to guard privacy of authors. Timestamps have a deliberate error of up to 10 minutes. For very active editors or wiki’s with little activity this would not suffice. More importantly all coordinates have been rounded to a half degree longitude and latitude (roughly 55 km or 34 miles squared).

Tech note

The animation and maps were implemented in html5, with the canvas object. I used this same approach two years ago,with another animation about Wikipedia. Since then browser support for html5 canvas has considerably improved.