Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Add view count to videos

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Aren't these already available?

Aren't these stats already available with either this tool or multiple tools like it?: example (see the sortable Views columns)

If so, is this proposal only about displaying them at the video file? I find the views stats info for video files confusing:

• on the "Page information" page it displays "Page views in the past 30 days" – which page views (the file page on WMC, the video on WP, the file page on WP) and does include or maybe even only show the video plays?
• when clicking on "Mediaviews Analysis on Toolforge" it displays a different number of "Requests", again what does it show and please clarify that on the respective pages

Prototyperspective (talk) 12:56, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

The mediaviews are just counts of how many times a request was made to a file or a thumbnail as logged by the webservers. They are not pageviews; that is mostly terminology that has bled into those interfaces because of the fact that this is exposed by the pageviews api, to which later mediaviews were added onto..

https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/mediaviews/?project=commons.wikimedia.org&platform=&agent=user&referer=all-referers&start=2023-07&end=2024-06&files=Angkor_-_Zentrum_des_K%C3%B6nigreichs_der_Khmer_(CC_BY-SA_4.0).webm

Is in that category you linked and both tools show 3400 views of the media file over 30 days.

However.. for video this is potentially broken, as there are now multiple requests needed for playing back files (esp on mobile) and this might skew the statistics.. I'm not entirely sure about that, but i wouldn't be surprised. Additionally, this includes request for the thumbnail poster, which is not a view of the video itself of course. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:29, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Well so now I think 3400 are video-plays and the count on the Info page is how often the WMC page was viewed (does it count Wikipedia embeds of the WMC page?). I think some clarifying info on the relevant page(s) about these things seems needed.

Also I think it really needs changes to search indexing (don't know if it SEO or sth else) of videos on WMC, why isn't the video showing even if I search for "Angkor - Zentrum des Königreichs der Khmer" verbatim on DuckDuckGo or Google in the videos tab? Prototyperspective (talk) 21:03, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

> Well so now I think 3400 are video-plays and the count on the Info page is how often the WMC page was viewed

Correct

> Also I think it really needs changes to search indexing

It is a known issue that Google ignores all our File pages. This is because any link to such a page ends with the extension of a media file, and Google assumes them to be links to direct files instead of wiki pages. It does this for any link in the world of that form, it's just that we use them very heavily. This long time issue is tracked as phab:T54647.

In addition, Google only indexes things that it will think people will search for. They have even told Wikimedia this in the past "Google doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index, or serve your page, even if your page follows the Google Search Essentials." —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:51, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I have created Community Wishlist/Wishes/(Commons) file description pages should be indexable by (Google) search for the SEO issue —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:09, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

This is a horrible state and I wonder if this is Web search engines are allowed to so heavily nonindex major large websites.

Isn't this against net neutrality or something else? Also I think this kind of needs a lot of attention and work by WMF, the broader community, and people supportive of Wikimedia projects; like it would need to be the first thing to address before other things because you can make your site as great as you want but if people don't know about and find it, it's largely mute and wasted time and effort etc. A lot more needs to be done, please let me know if you have any ideas – why for example isn't the WMF making some investigations into the bad state of search indexing and then making a blog post etc about it? Why have people not asked Google or create some kind of open letter asking them to fix the indexing? Prototyperspective (talk) 21:07, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I would add that even if the PageViews there would be "video plays" (which is not), asking to go to an external tool, then click here, then there, and lastly here in the corner to see if a media has been played or not is not having a view count. Theklan (talk) 10:42, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Agree that's why I asked If so, is this proposal only about displaying them at the video file?. You don't need to go to an external tool though, go to "Page information" on the left then "Mediaviews Analysis on Toolforge" at the very bottom (still nearly nobody knows and finds this). Prototyperspective (talk) 11:47, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I would definitely suggest making a separate wish to add media views as a separate line in the Information table below "Page views in the past 30 days". As soon as they are in one 'production' level link, they can be added to other places.

Also, I note that Commons doesn't have a link for the pages views. This can be done by creating a corresponding w:MediaWiki:pvi-month-count-value on Commons. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:16, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Having the views there would be good but it seems like that is what this proposal asks for or if not what could/should probably be added to it. Don't think it's high-importance but it may be something that could be implemented fairly quickly. Those numbers usually aren't encouraging btw, maybe that raises awareness of other issues but probably not by much. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:40, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm not asking about the pageviews at Commons, I'm asking about how many people actually plays the video wherever they do so. Theklan (talk) 09:31, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Thought these were the Mediaviews – is there any indication of it only counting Mediaviews from WMC rather from any site that contains the file? Prototyperspective (talk) 11:05, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

No, that isn't a media view information, this is how many people loaded the file page at Commons. Not even how many people have seen that the video exists via a Wikipedia page or whatever. I don't think that it is so complex to understand what "Media views" mean, and that we can't do that now. Theklan (talk) 09:30, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Have a look at this, User:Jan-David Franke (WMDE), please. Theklan (talk) 09:32, 10 August 2024 (UTC)