It's true that MediaWiki supports search based solely on the ?search query
parameter. Regardless of whether title=Special:Search is specified.
This is mostly for legacy reasons as search predates the concept of
special pages.
However, would it make sense to instead count these as page views for
'Special:Search'?
One thing worth clarifying is that analytics team doesn't own the pageview definition (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Page_view), we implement it to the best of our ability. Deciding what constitutes a pageview for search falls on the search team as they are the ones that know their functionality best (substitute "search team" by "some entity with knowledge of mediawiki's search abilities") According to Timo's comment it seems that "?search" requests should be counted as true pageviews but let us know otherwise via phab ticket or this list.
Thanks,
Nuria
On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 11:57 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Oliver Keyes, 02/12/2015 18:52:
Via Brian Davis we find out the responsible patch is
https://github.com/wikimedia/analytics-refinery-source/commit/05e5da92553dbd...
Context: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Page_view/Archive_1#Parameters...
Nemo
Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics