A lot of thanks and credit to the analytics team for keeping these counts running.
That being said, it might be a good idea not to draw too many conclusions from the pageview counts on user behaviour without a closer analysis, especially for the Special:* pages. As demonstrated by the October 16th drop, these are strongly affected by instrument bias. On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:56 PM, Alex Druk <[email protected]> wrote: > Because similar patterns are observed for many other languages (but not > all), it looks like R.Stuart Geiger explanation is correct: from October > 16 2014 Special:Random page is just not counted any more (with some not > clear exceptions). > > That’s a pity because we lost valuable source of info how Wikipedia users > look for information. Random search was (and is?) a major way users explore > Wikipedias. In many languages Special:Random was significantly higher than > Main_Page count and certainly higher than search with index.php. > > (I do not want to point finger, but maybe somebody at WMF considered this > emotionally.) > > IMHO, logs should be logs and log actual activity. At least such dramatic > changes in logging user’s activity should be documented somewhere. Betters > in Read.me file that should accompany raw logs. > > >Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 20:08:40 -0700 > >From: "R.Stuart Geiger" <[email protected]> > >To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities > > <[email protected]> > >Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 117, Issue > > 14 > >Message-ID: > > <CAKt0Q=e-_=0= > [email protected]> > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > > >Going from 86,000,000 a month to 31,000 a month is quite a drop, and the > >shift is pretty dramatic. It goes from 1.7 million one day to 715 the next > >and stays flat (http://stats.grok.se/en/201410/Special:Random). > > > >I was also thinking there could be a bot or something that is scraping > >Special:Random, but the drop also happens for Special:Random/Talk -- which > >hardly anybody uses, but it still drops flat the same day ( > >http://stats.grok.se/en/201410/Special:Random/Talk). It doesn't happen > for > >Special:Upload or Special:Log though. > > > >October 16th, 2014 is the day it changes. Anybody know of something that > >might have changed that day with logging? Also, there have to be way more > >than ~1,000 hits a day to Special:Random. Perhaps pageviews started to be > >counted for the page that it got redirected to, rather than the > >Special:Random page itself. But then why wouldn't it go to 0? What are > >those ~1,000 hits a day? > > > >[image: 👻] ~~ it is a mystery ~~ [image: 👻] > > > -- > Thank you. > > Alex Druk > [email protected] > www.wikipediatrends.com > (775) 237-8550 Google voice > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > >
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