On 5 December 2014 at 20:13, Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
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!
Hmm. A quick and dirty test - look at a single high-profile image in a consistent location and see what clickthroughs are like.
Yesterday's enwiki front-page image got 2785 pageviews.
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/File:Guyou_doubly_periodic_projection_SW.JPG
For the same image on 4 Dec 2012, 7700.
http://stats.grok.se/en/201312/File:Point_Reyes_Lighthouse_(April_2012).jpg
And the one for 4 Dec 2012, 5500.
http://stats.grok.se/en/201212/File:Neophema_chrysostoma_mortimer_2.jpg
Mainpage views on those dates were 9.3m (2012), 12.6m (2013), 12.2m (2014); so 0.02% in 2014, 0.06% in 2013, 0.06% in 2012. Approximately one third as many front-page viewers click through to POTD in 2014 as did so in 2012/13.
Views for those images *on Commons*, meanwhile, go from 15 (2012) and 35 (2013) to 235 (2014). So further confirmation for the traffic-moves-to-Commons hypothesis (and, interestingly, confirmation that a lot fewer people click through to the description page from MediaViewer...)
This suggests we're on to something here.
Anyone able to whip up total views by namespace for enwiki versus say eswiki, month by month, over the past eighteen months?