Good to know that page exists. But is it rather impractical for us to visit that page daily and scan for changes that might influence how stats are gathered.

So please if you expect stats will be affected, drop us a line. Thanks so much.

Erik

From: analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Maryana Pinchuk
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 5:41 PM
To: Diederik van Liere
Cc: mobile-tech; Tomasz Finc; Brion Vibber; Arthur Richards; A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has aninterest in Wikipedia and analytics.
Subject: Re: [Analytics] Suspicious increase in mobile pv's

On Jan 8, 2013, at 6:57 AM, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere@wikimedia.org> wrote:

So what would be really useful is to have a canonical place where mobile deployments are logged with some notes if there are changes to how links / URL's are handled / processed. It can be as simple as a wiki, and maybe a quick email to the Analytics list to notify us as well.

https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend/Deployments

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Max Semenik <msemenik@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Indeed, in December we've rolled out a change that removed the bogus code that previously prevented redirection to canonical URLs. However, search JS uses raw URL-encoding which results in people visiting a lot of non-canonical URLs. I attempted a fix in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/42766/ - hope to squeeze it in today's deployment.

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 4:47 AM, Asher Feldman <afeldman@wikimedia.org> wrote:

It looks like the December numbers are indeed skewed, possibly due to a link encoding change in mobilefrontend that is doubling many requests.

I counted en.m.wikipedia/wiki/article requests and my total count agrees with stats.wikimedia (around 2B), but http 301 redirects went from being around 1% of responses to >18% in one random mid-december day.

An example is:

cp1044.wikimedia.org 214632678 2013-01-08T00:27:24 0.094004869 0.0.0.0 miss/301 20 GET http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawn%20(chess) - text/html; charset=utf-8 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_chess - Mozilla/5.0%20(iPhone;%20CPU%20iPhone%20OS%206_0_1%20like%20Mac%20OS%20X)%20AppleWebKit/536.26%20(KHTML,%20like%20Gecko)%20Version/6.0%20Mobile/10A523%20Safari/8536.25 en-us -

The correct article name for the above example is http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawn_(chess). The desktop site in safari provides a correct link, but the mobile site converts the underscore to an encoded space.

There may be some other issues as well - the number of requests with a blank referrer have increased heavily. This is partially due to ios6 using google over ssl, but the number of blank referrers increased heavily for android as well. My rough estimate is that mobile pageviews actually increased by around 1/3 in december.

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 2:00 PM, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi all,

It has come to our attention that there is quite a big jump in mobile pageviews on http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyMobile.htm

We are looking into the exact cause of it right now, but suffice to say for now, do not use these numbers for the month of December 2012.

Best,

Diederik

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