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