Hello Issa,
Thank you for your question. The very high number of views of the "-" page is explained by this dash value being used as a special value for "no page title found" when extracting titles from urls. We definitely should document this in the API, creating this task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T150249 Best Joseph
On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 12:28 AM, Issa Rice riceissa@gmail.com wrote:
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/desktop/user/-/daily/20151001/20151031.
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=-&allmonths=allmonths&drilldown=all.
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
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