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Analytics/AQS/Devices Analytics
This page documents the Unique Devices dataset (v1) as developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation since January 1st, 2016. This data set contains the number of unique devices having visited Wikipedia or its sisters project over some period of time, and is accessible through downloading files or via the AQS API. An extended database version of the same data (including country-level numbers) is available internally on Hive, see Analytics/Data Lake/Traffic/Unique Devices.
Quick Start
AQS API
Technical Documentation: https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/?doc (includes interactive examples).
Get the daily number of unique devices for en.wikipedia.org for the month of February 2016, for all sites (desktop and mobile; please have in mind that if a device visits the desktop and mobile site it is counted twice):
GET http://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/en.wikipedia.org/all-sites/daily/20160201/20160229
Get the monthly number of unique devices for the mobile version of fr.wikipedia.org for the months of January, February and March 2016:
GET http://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/fr.wikipedia.org/mobile-site/monthly/20160101/20160301
Get the daily number of unique devices for the desktop version of es.wikipedia.org for the first ten days of April 2016:
GET http://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/es.wikipedia.org/desktop-site/daily/20160401/20160410
Get the monthly number of unique devices for all wikipedias for the first three months of 2018:
GET http://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/unique-devices/all-wikipedia-projects/all-sites/monthly/20180101/20180301
Downloads
You can find daily and monthly data TSV files at this address: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/unique_devices/.
Files include three columns: underestimate, offset, total
To see what each of these three numbers mean, please read: Analytics/Data_Lake/Traffic/Unique_Devices/Last_access_solution
Data Quality
To ensure we provide quality information, we have made the choice of including in the files and the API only projects having at least 1,000 (one thousand) unique devices for the considered time period (day or month). Projects with less than 1000 unique devices show too much random variation for data to be actionable.
More information on how 1,000 was selected as the limit is available in the Last access solution subpage.
More Reading
Metric Definition
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices
Why the name "unique devices"
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Unique_Devices#Why_the_name_unique_devices
Differences between unique devices and unique users
Can we count unique users instead of devices?
The answer is no, regardless of method. We could only do that if we ask everyone to login to use wiki projects.
How do we count unique devices?
We use a method that respects user privacy to count unique devices which does not include cookies to track your browser history. Analytics/Data Lake/Traffic/Unique Devices/Last access solution
Underlying database
Analytics/Data Lake/Traffic/Unique Devices (not public, includes additional country-level information)
The Analytics Query Service API (AQS)
- Analytics/AQS
- {waxer} R interface to AQS (includes unique devices endpoint)