View source for Research:Activity session

=== Time on page ===
[[File:Time on page.svg|thumb|a visual representation of the calculation of "time on page".]]
Time on page is another useful metric that can be calculated if we are able to identify activity sessions; it refers to the time spent idling on an article after opening it. In this context it is primarily useful for ''read'' actions, not ''edit'' actions, since edit actions are identifiable in logs by the point at which the user completed, rather than started, them.

To calculate time on page for each action(A) in a sequence (S), we need two timestamps: the timestamp of the event, and the timestamp of the event following it. Subtracting the timestamp of the following event from the event we wish to calculate time-on-page for gives us the amount of time spent idling on that page. One problem with this approach is that it's impossible to ''directly'' identify the time spent on the last page. Some of the previous implementations within the Wikimedia Foundation, particularly the [[Research:Activity_session#App_session_analysis|app session analysis]] project, have solved for this by not even attempting to estimate the time spent, which is an approach that other implementations, such as that used by Google Analytics, also take. While we are confident we can work out a way of providing accurate estimates in those situations, in the meantime time-on-page consists of the time elapsed between an action, and the action following it within the session - with the caveats that it cannot be calculated for the last or ''only'' action in a session.

There are a lot of applications of time-on-page. For readers, we can investigate whether there are indications that it's correlated with value extracted, or article quality, giving us a better idea of how to tweak content to appeal to users and how to measure the success of these changes. For editors, we could look at the time spent on an edit and see if it's possible to reduce that without reducing quality - effectively, freeing up editor energy for (potentially) more edits.