Lars,
I can feel your pain. I also feel it from time to time when reality is at odds with expectations. What I should have done is put up a notice to explain this anomaly, to avoid confusion. My bad.
Like I said: we planned to implement a second data stream. In fact I heard there was a patch to do just that, but the server couldn't handle it, too much packet loss, so it was retracted.
Yeah it gives wikistats a bad name. You're right. The chain is as strong as the weakest link.
Now we're at it: I recently discovered page counts per article do not include access to the mobile site. This is being discussed, it seems not so easy to fix. Bring out the torches.
Erik
-----Original Message----- From: wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Lars Aronsson Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 4:03 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: [Wikitech-l] [Analytics] Fwd: Page view stats we can believe in
On 02/14/2013 02:56 AM, Erik Zachte wrote:
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.
Noooo, nobody in the web business counts bot accesses. Pages, page views, are human page views. You need to filter out bots, API calls, and non-page fetches. The main Wikistats, counting articles and users is very accurate, and these nonsense page view stats give Wikistats a bad name. Plus they are used by all the GLAM projects to show museums how much people view pictures from their museum, and now that's all fake and exaggeration. It's 2-3 years wasted. Please don't waste any more years or months of our time. We now have to go back to museums and apologize.
The stats still show a breakdown per language,
No, that's exactly what fails. Wikistats indicates that Wiktionary has more page views than Wikisource, and believed this, and it surprised me, but now I understand that we are counting bots that follow red links, and that is a sport Wiktionary will always win. Humans tend to read Wikisource, but bots are drawn to spend time in the link mazes of Wiktionary.
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.
And it's far more for smaller projects, and for link-intensive Wiktionary, and for those languages of Wikipedia that create articles by bots, such as Dutch, Swedish, Vietnamese and Volapük.
This bot-created article about a spider "has been viewed 12 times in the last 30 days", but only by bots?
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acantheis_variatus http://stats.grok.se/nl/latest/Acantheis_variatus
Bots creating articles and bots reading them, what a joke! And they are creating articles about spiders!