New Reports Furnish Metrics to Our Localization Community
From the hard work by Mozilla’s Metrics team comes localizer metric reports that will show growth and usage data for each of our Firefox locales. The l10n-drivers team has been asking in meetings if we could show the impact that our volunteers are having with reports like the one sampled below. If you click the following link you will download a sample report.
Initially, I sketched out what I thought would be valuable information for the report, ran it by the l10n-drivers, and sent it to the metrics team to start implementation. In my opinion, an effective report provides both download and active daily user information to our localizers about their locales AND the geos in which their locales are being used. Let’s review the contents for those who might need a guide. Feel free to reference the attached screen shots as you read.
Locale-specific information
We are presenting both the download and active daily user (ADU) information (usages statistics and pie charts) for versions of Firefox. ADUs are based on the blocklist pings we track. (More on blocklist can be found at Morgamic’s post.)
Geographic-specific information
Each report will show both the download and blocklist for the top five locales inside a country where the localizer’s translated Firefox is most prominently used. In many cases, this is easy to map. Locale code “fr” is probably most prominently used in France. “de” in Germany. “es-ES” in Spain. In some cases, we’ll have to make guesses, like for our Kurdish localizers. Finally, we will provide a list of the top ten countries (by average blocklist pings) where the localizer’s Firefox is being used.
For the first time, our community of l10n volunteers will have a more comprehensive set of data points to help measure the progress and spread of their work. By providing both locale and geographic information, these reports illustrate the impact that each localization team is providing.
Below are two images of a sample two page report.
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What does “Downloads for [locale]” mean? Downloads from http://ftp.mozilla.org only or updates which comes to users via automatic updates? Thanks.
I’ve found these reports to be quite interesting. For example I learned that proportionally more people are using the French version in Tunisia than in France, and that overall we have more French-speaking users in Morocco than in Switzerland.
So, are there plans to expand the geographic-specific information? As a matter of fact, some locales that you cited (de and fr) are used “prominently” in several countries.
Maybe you could just add a few separate country reports to complement the locale reports?
@Pavel
“Downloads for [locale]” refers to any download of a prebuilt localization of Firefox that originates from a link to downloads.mozilla.org.
In your case, that would be anyone who downloads the Czech translation of Firefox by clicking on the following link:
http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5.5&os=win&lang=cs
Which they could get to by either
http://www.mozilla.cz/ or
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html
What doesn’t get included is anyone using Firefox with a different built in localization and installing the Czech language pack (if such a thing exists).
In the “downloads for pt-PT” section why do you think we have increases in all three versions at the same time?
“Blocklist” is at best obscure and has a lot of negative connotations. I’d spell out “Pings for Mozilla’s addons blocklist (a useful indicator of active browser users)” in the first heading, use “blocklist pings” in the table columns, and put “See _morgamic’s post_ on blocklist pings” at the bottom of the PDF.
Hi Seth,
1. In addition to your localization needs, do you ever have globalization needs? (I am a professional Russian>English translator with 25 years Russian language experience).
2. Tommy Davidson (that’s how we know him) is my first cousin once removed. Small world, eh?
Did this ever get to a stage where we can access/view the data? I’d love to know a bit more about usage for my locale