Indeed weird. I would have guessed that the spikes were due to us not having identified spiders correctly back then, but then we should see spikes in the agent=spider version of the graph:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=spider&start=2016-01-01&end=2017-02-22&pages=Special:RecentChanges

Our user base that knows about Special:RecentChanges is too small to justify the spikes, so it's definitely bots. It would be good to figure out which bots so we can maybe reach out to them and offer them better ways of consuming the data (we have streams, etc.). This might be something the reading team is interested in following up on. In any case, I don't see an obvious problem other than generally we need to get better at bot detection but that's *really* hard for a number of reasons. It's a goal of ours.

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 6:11 PM, Joe Matazzoni <jmatazzoni@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Analytics!
I was looking at the page views chart for the Special:RecentChanges page, here

https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2016-01-01&end=2017-02-22&pages=Special:RecentChanges

Over the last year, the PVs count has gone through some pretty wild swings, some of which were sustained over months. I assume these are artifacts or bugs, and not a reflection of true usage patterns? Is that right? (The last month has seen a new surge; any idea what that is?)

_____________________
Joe Matazzoni
Product Manager, Collaboration
Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco
mobile 202.744.7910
jmatazzoni@wikimedia.org
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."

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