Dear Toby,
I recently saw your comment on a blog posthttp://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=173by Magnus Manske regarding the lack of Wikipedia page view data besides the oft-overloaded http://stats.grok.se/. I was wondering if there's been any progress at WMF on building a more stable, central, and complete source for this data?
I ask because I'm a data scientist at a small research non-profit called Harmony Institute http://harmony-institute.org/, where we study the social impact of media (primarily television and film). I'm currently building an interactive web app http://harmony-institute.org/work/impactspace/ that visualizes social impact on a variety of issues by many documentary films. One indicator of interest is "information-seeking behavior," i.e. are audiences seeking out information about a film or issue. Besides Google search trends, an excellent proxy for this is Wikipedia page views for both film pages, e.g. Escape Firehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Fire:_The_Fight_to_Rescue_American_Healthcare, and issue-related pages, e.g. Health care reformhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_reform .
I'm currently trying to use stats.grok.se to grab raw data in JSON form; unfortunately, the site almost always responds with "Server overloaded, please throttle your requests," and no amount of throttling seems to suffice. I'm aware that there are many TBs of raw data for the downloading, but I don't have the resources to handle that much data, nor do I need more than the tiniest fraction of it.
I would *love* to show Wikipedia page view statistics for film pages in our app. If you have any updates on progress or suggestions on how I might do this, I would be very appreciative.
Thanks very much for your and all of WMF's hard work -- I'm a proud donor to the cause. :)
Best, Burton DeWilde