Lars,
I think you are overdoing it. The reports are not nonsense, but have over time become more inaccurate than some other stats we present. Actually if the reports would have mentioned 'pages served' rather than 'page views' they still would be spot on.
Of course I also would have hoped this filter to be implemented now. But sometimes projects take longer than planned, at WMF like everywhere else.
The stats still show a breakdown per language, and relative growth, assuming bot activity is more or less consistent from one month to another (of course not over longer periods).
Last quote I got (in April?) is that overall 40% of traffic is bot related. That could be more now.
Erik
-----Original Message----- From: Lars Aronsson [mailto:lars@aronsson.se] Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 1:28 AM To: Erik Zachte Cc: 'A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics.'; Wikimedia developers Subject: Re: [Analytics] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Page view stats we can believe in
Hi Erik,
You're quite right numbers are inflated, and we've been over this before [1]. Below are some sampled data for da.wiktionary from webstatscollector [2] and squid log [3] Bot traffic is a substantial share of 'page views' (but not the majority as you suggest).
We discussed this extensively in April and as I remember (my mail archive is somehow incomplete) decided to implement a second cleaned-up stream without /bot/crawler/spider/http (keeping the original stream so as not break trend lines)
However that bot free stream (projectcounts files with extra set of per wiki totals) never happened yet, and I'm pretty sure we changed plans since, and probably now wait for Kraken. Diederik can you add to this?
Oh my, I thought this was in operation already. I've actually been looking at these page view stats, and now I feel like a fool.
Why not just remove these web pages at http://stats.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm since they contain only nonsense? Continuity with old nonsense is still nonsense, so remove everything now and start a new project with real numbers.
[1] On April 8, 2012 you reported a similar issue for Swedish Wikipedia. I checked by then one hour of sampled squid log. 9 out of 13 requests were bots.
Nobody doubts that the Swedish Wikipedia has a substantial amount of human traffic. But for smaller projects, the background noise will dominate. If bots are 9 out of 13 requests to sv.wikipedia (really?), they can easily be 99% of traffic to da.wiktionary.
One easy way to tell would be to observe the daily rhythm. Since Swedish and Danish are limited to one timezone, traffic in the middle of the night should be much smaller than mid-day traffic. But bots could be operating all night, all day. So the least active hour is probably the background noise from bots.