I've written a blog post about the decline in pageviews to some Wikipedia pages over the last few years. The blog post can be found here:

I'm planning to post a condensed version of this to a more public and widely-read forum, and would like to get any feedback on it from people who are more familiar with the analytics.

In particular, I'm interested in potential explanations of the pageview decline that I might have missed, such as changes to the way the analytics are logged, or changes to people's browser or operating system use patterns, or changes in bot frequency. I tried looking for data on trends in these, and although I could find some overall data on the use of various browsers and bot access, I couldn't get trend data that I could directly compare with the individual pageview data. So if you have easily usable sources of such trend data (stretching at least as far back as 2013), or if you have some theories based on looking at such data in the past, I'd really like to know.

So that you don't have to read the whole post to get an idea of what I'm talking about, I'll paste below two sample tables from the post that illustrate the sort of trends I am talking about:

Trends in colors (notice the sharp decline from 2013 to 2014; a monthly breakdown found in the post shows that the decline was steady from March 2013 to June 2014):

Page name	Pageviews in year 2014	Pageviews in year 2013	Pageviews in year 2012	Pageviews in year 2011	Pageviews in year 2010	Pageviews in year 2009	Pageviews in year 2008	Total	Percentage	Tags
Black	431K	1.5M	1.3M	778K	900K	1M	958K	6.9M	16.1	Colors
Blue	710K	1.3M	1M	987K	1.2M	1.2M	1.1M	7.6M	17.8	Colors
Brown	192K	284K	318K	292K	308K	300K	277K	2M	4.6	Colors
Green	422K	844K	779K	707K	882K	885K	733K	5.3M	12.3	Colors
Orange	133K	181K	251K	259K	275K	313K	318K	1.7M	4	Colors
Purple	524K	906K	847K	895K	865K	841K	592K	5.5M	12.8	Colors
Red	568K	797K	912K	1M	1.1M	873K	938K	6.2M	14.6	Colors
Violet	56K	96K	75K	77K	69K	71K	65K	509K	1.2	Colors
White	301K	795K	615K	545K	788K	575K	581K	4.2M	9.8	Colors
Yellow	304K	424K	453K	433K	452K	427K	398K	2.9M	6.8	Colors
Total	3.6M	7.1M	6.6M	6M	6.9M	6.5M	6M	43M	100	–
Percentage	8.5	16.7	15.4	14	16	15.3	14	100	–	–

Trends in the most populated countries (note the peaking in 2010 and decline from then to 2014):

Page name	Pageviews in year 2014	Pageviews in year 2013	Pageviews in year 2012	Pageviews in year 2011	Pageviews in year 2010	Pageviews in year 2009	Pageviews in year 2008	Total	Percentage	Tags
China	5.7M	6.8M	7.8M	6.1M	6.9M	5.7M	6.1M	45M	9	Countries
India	8.8M	12M	12M	11M	14M	8.8M	7.6M	73M	14.5	Countries
United States	13M	15M	18M	18M	34M	16M	15M	129M	25.7	Countries
Indonesia	5.3M	5.2M	3.7M	3.6M	4.2M	3.1M	2.5M	28M	5.5	Countries
Brazil	4.8M	4.9M	5.3M	5.5M	7.5M	4.9M	4.3M	37M	7.4	Countries
Pakistan	2.9M	4.5M	4.4M	4.3M	5.2M	4M	3.2M	28M	5.7	Countries
Bangladesh	2.2M	2.9M	3M	2.8M	2.9M	2.2M	1.7M	18M	3.5	Countries
Russia	5.6M	5.6M	6.5M	6.8M	8.6M	5.4M	5.8M	44M	8.8	Countries
Nigeria	2.6M	2.6M	2.9M	3M	3.5M	2.6M	2M	19M	3.8	Countries
Japan	4.8M	6.4M	6.5M	8.3M	10M	7.3M	6.6M	50M	10	Countries
Mexico	3.1M	3.9M	4.3M	4.3M	5.9M	4.7M	4.5M	31M	6.1	Countries
Total	59M	69M	74M	74M	103M	65M	59M	502M	100	–
Percentage	11.7	13.8	14.7	14.7	20.4	12.9	11.8	100	–	–

I'm also pasting my hypothesis list from near the end of the post below:

1. Google’s Knowledge Graph: This is the hypothesis raised in Wikipediocracy, the Daily Dot, and the Register. The Knowledge Graph was introduced in 2012. Through 2013, Google rolled out snippets based on the Knowledge Graph in its search results. So if, for instance, you only wanted the birth date and nationality of a musician, Googling would show you that information right in the search results and you wouldn’t need to click through to the Wikipedia page.
2. Other means of accessing Wikipedia’s knowledge that don’t involve viewing it directly: For instance, Apple’s Siri tool uses data from Wikipedia, and people making queries to this tool may get information from Wikipedia without hitting the encyclopedia.
3. Changes to pageview-counting methods or to the number of false pageviews generated by bots and crawlers: While this probably isn’t sufficient to explain the entire decline, it could well be the case that some of the decline arises from bots and crawlers becoming more efficient in terms of the frequency with which they crawl Wikipedia and generate false pageviews. The official estimate is that about 15% of pageviews are bot-generated,
4. Substitution away from Wikipedia to other pages that are becoming more search-optimized and growing in number: For many topics, Wikipedia may have been clearly the best information source a few years back (as judged by Google), but the growth of niche information sources, as well as better search methods, have displaced it from its undisputed leadership position.
5. Substitution away from coarser, broader pages to finer, narrower pages within Wikipedia: While this cannot directly explain an overall decline in pageviews, it can explain a decline in pageviews for particular kinds of pages. Indeed, I suspect that this is partly what’s going on with the early decline of pageviews.

Thanks,

Vipul