I think I am missing some basic understanding of this parameter then. In my understanding, if I saw 1000 pageviews total, and 999 of them were internal referrals, then this would indicate 1 user who visited 1000 (999 by clicking on internal links). If I instead saw 1000 pageviews and none of them were internal referrals, it would indicate that nobody clicked on internal links on wikipedia during that time period. (Obviously visitations start and stop before and after the period in question, but ignoring that overlap). Is that correct?

By the pigeon hole principle, yes, if we had 1000 total pageviews and 999 internal referrer pageviews, then it'd be one user. But that's not what we're seeing, we're seeing 5k or so distinct IPs hit 9k or so pages from the outside. Then 3k or so distinct IPs hit 9k or so pages with internal referrers. I was trying to make two points:

* there could be many users for each IP and many IPs for each user, in fairly unpredictable combinations

* Given the numbers we're seeing, it's more like some number wildly hovering around 1/2 of our users are clicking through and checking out a few other articles. This is a little different from normal, and that seems expected since these are beta and alpha users. When looking at mobile users in general, I get a much lower ratio of internal to external referers as I'd expect:

unique_ips is_internal num_pvs

3213398 false 6778157

731019 true 2310153

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT ip) AS unique_ips,

(referer_class = "internal") as is_internal,

count(*) AS num_pvs

FROM wmf.webrequest

WHERE TRUE = TRUE

AND webrequest_source = 'mobile'

AND year = 2015

AND month = 5

AND day = 25

AND hour = 1

AND agent_type <> 'spider'

AND is_pageview = TRUE

AND x_analytics_map['mf-m'] IS NULL

AND access_method IN ('mobile app', 'mobile web')

GROUP BY

(referer_class = "internal")

ORDER BY unique_ips DESC

LIMIT 50;