Unfortunately, I can't tell you anything more than what you already know! I think that huge, temporary spikes in edits or pageviews that don't match expected patterns of human use (like the death of a celebrity or a big editing campaign) are most likely caused by bots. With editing spikes, I can usually confirm this belief by examining the edits. With pageview spikes, it's much harder. If the spike was in the last 90 days, I could investigate more by looking at the confidential
raw traffic data, but after 90 days, that data is deleted to protect user privacy.
The case you mentioned fits all my criteria. First, it is a huge, temporary spike. Second, it doesn't match expected patterns of human use: there is no matching spike in mobile pageviews and the pages involved are not pages humans would want to read. So, it's for these reasons only that I am confident that it was caused by bots.
Now, why would someone use a bot to access millions of Bangla Wikipedia articles for a single month? I have no idea. It could just be a programmer somewhere doing an experiment. Your guess is as good as mine 😊
Hi Neil,
Thank you very much for responding so fast.
That's can be the potential answer! Can you please share any definite (or relative) information regarding the error at that time, if possible? Can you give me any idea on why the bot view increases so much on a certain year (and on some certain dates)? If possible, any example will be really helpful.
Ankan
That's a good question! I think the most likely explanation is that a bot automatically viewed those pages. I see that you have already removed "spider" and "automated" traffic in your Wikistats graphs, but those classifications are not perfect. Before March 2020, they only detected bots that explicitly marked themselves as bots. Now,
our methods are more sophisticated, but I am sure they still miss some things.
Hello everyone,
I am Ankan, a Wikimedian from Bangladesh. Recently, I was searching for the Wikimedia stats website for research purposes. I got a bit curious regarding the
Bengali Wikipedia total page view section, as the traffic didn't match the normal flow in January 2018 and faced a sudden surge of desktop access by users. It is unprecedented and highest till today. If you check the normal rate of desktop access, you will see that it is almost 450% than the second highest.
The pageview result suggests that the top-visited pages are category-related and date-related pages (the highest visited one is 'Category:Stubs', see
here) which is quite enigmatic as these pages are hardly viewed by the general readers. The result of certain dates in January 2018 is completely exceptional.
Note that, I have checked some other languages and the rate is normal there.
I am seeking your assistance to analyze the probable reason behind this surge. Thanks in advance!
Best regards,
Ankan
--
Ankan Ghosh Dastider (he/him)
Analytics mailing list
Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
--
_______________________________________________
Analytics mailing list
Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
--
Ankan Ghosh Dastider (he/him)
Analytics mailing list
Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
--