Lane Rasberry, 06/03/2014 20:23:
I watch pageview traffic to about 100 popular Wikipedia health articles. In January 2014 as compared to January 2013, stats.grok.se http://stats.grok.se reports about a 50% drop in pageviews.
Monitor how? Do you manage to use http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/treeviews/ despite https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42259 ?
Does someone have a ready explanation for this? The obvious explanation would be that Wikipedia's traffic has halved, which does not seem right to me, but it could be so.
Can someone direct me to previous or current conversations about this?
Of course for general stats you can always see http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm and there was some research lately https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2013_Wikimedia_traffic_trends.pdf . The rest is just speculation; in particular when looking at narrow portions of the traffic, like a small subset of pages or a "small" project, the noise (i.e. bots) is often more than the signal, so you can only trust multi-year trends.
Nemo