Dear Analytics Mailing List,
Recently while querying pageviews of various pages, I discovered that the page whose title is a single hyphen character (i.e. with the title "-", with URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-, which redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen-minus) receives an unusually high number of pageviews under the Pageview API. Taking October 2015 as an example, the page received 5.4 million pageviews during that month according to the API: < https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/pageviews/per-article/en.wikipedia...
.
However, according the stats.grok.se (which was still operational in the same month), the page received only 1209 pageviews: http://stats.grok.se/en/201510/-.
Looking at the tabulation of pageviews on Wikipedia Views, the increase in pageviews for this page coincides with the change to the Pageview API in July 2015: < http://wikipediaviews.org/displayviewsformultiplemonths.php?page=-&allmo...
.
As I understand, page titles must be URL-encoded before the query, but the URL-encoding of "-" is itself.
I looked at the API documentation but did not see this behavior listed, so I am wondering where these numbers are coming from.
Best regards, Issa