Dear Data Enthusiasts,

In collaboration with the Services team, the analytics team wishes to announce a public Pageview API.  For an example of what kind of UIs someone could build with it, check out this excellent demo (code).

The API can tell you how many times a wiki article or project is viewed over a certain period.  You can break that down by views from web crawlers or humans, and by desktop, mobile site, or mobile app.  And you can find the 1000 most viewed articles on any project, on any given day or month that we have data for.  We currently have data back through October and we will be able to go back to May 2015 when the loading jobs are all done.  For more information, take a look at the user docs.

After many requests from the community, we were really happy to finally make this our top priority and get it done.  Huge thanks to Gabriel, Marko, Petr, and Eric from Services, Alexandros and all of Ops really, Henrik for maintaining stats.grok, and, of course, the many community members who have been so patient with us all this time.

The Research team’s Article Recommender tool already uses the API to rank pages and determine relative importance.  Wiki Education Foundation’s dashboard is going to be using it to count how many times an article has been viewed since a student edited it.  And there are other grand plans for this data like “article finder”, which will find low-rated articles with a lot of pageviews; this can be used by editors looking for high-impact work.  Join the fun, we’re happy to help get you started and listen to your ideas.  Also, if you find bugs or want to suggest improvements, please create a task in Phabricator and tag it with #Analytics-Backlog.

So what’s next?  We can think of too many directions to go into, for pageview data and Wikimedia project data, in general.  We need to work with you to make a great plan for the next few quarters.  Please chime in here with your needs.

Team Analytics