This is documented now here:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/PageviewAPI#Gotchas

On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 7:25 AM, Vipul Naik <vipulnaik1@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the clarification.

Any ideas why this number is much higher for some months? In particular, on desktop, it's high in the months of July to September 2015 (around 10 million, compared to the usual 5 million) and then high again in October 2016 (45 million, about 10x the usual value).

Data is from http://wikipediaviews.org/displayviewsformultiplemonths.php?page=-&allmonths=allmonths&drilldown=all which summarizes results from the Wikimedia API (and stats.grok.se for data before July 2015).

Vipul

On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 3:46 AM, Joseph Allemandou <jallemandou@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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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--

Joseph Allemandou

Data Engineer @ Wikimedia Foundation

IRC: joal

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