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

_______________________________________________
Analytics mailing list
Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics