I did look at this. You can clearly see the drop in eswiki vs ptwiki if you just look at page views of commons; there is a sharp drop in 2014-06 after Media Viewer is turned on.
For the "top declines" countries I looked at (well, Mexico and Ecuador), the commons page views aren't a significant fraction of overall page views, so this doesn't change the overall stats much. It's possible that for smaller projects this might significantly affect the total, but it would have to be a project with a big ratio of image views to article reads. --scott
On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
Idle thought...
It used to be that, when an image was clicked, it would generate a pageview of a local File: page (for Commons images, usually a "dummy" local page). On some projects, it would instead go to the corresponding Commons file page.
However, the use of mediaviewer means that a significant fraction of clicks on images will not lead to a new pageview; the user is satisfied with the lightbox, closes it in place, and stays on the page.
In the eswiki case, this seems to be a very convincing explanation for the Commons drop. As a project which has not allowed local uploads for a long time, I believe any image links went straight to Commons rather than to the local File page used on enwiki.
Which leads to an obvious question - on other projects, such as enwiki or frwiki, have we accounted for a drop in *file page* views? What do overall pageview numbers look like using, say, just mainspace/ns0?
I like the explanation. More work would probably have to be done to prove it, but it sounds good. And it illustrates the point that fewer pageviews is not always a bad thing!
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