My view had been informed by the documentation at
https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/:
Hourly page views per article for around 30 million article titles (Sept
2013) in around 800+ Wikimedia wikis. Repackaged
(with extreme shrinkage,
without losing granularity), corrected, reformatted. Daily files and two
monthly files (see notes below).
Regarding the claim that pagecounts-ez has data back to when wikimedia
started tracking pageviews, I'll point out another error in the
documentation that may have led to that view. The documentation claims that
data is available from 2007 onward:
From 2007 to May 2015: derived from Domas' pagecount/projectcount files
However, if you check out the actual files (
https://dumps.wikimedia.org/o
ther/pagecounts-ez/merged/), you'll see that the pagecounts only go back
to late 2011.
Ah, yes, but the projectcount files go back to 2007-12, that's where that
confusion comes from, we should clarify or generate the old data. I'm not
sure whether this is easy, but I think it's fairly straightforward and I've
opened a task for it:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T188041 (we have a
lot of work in our backlog, though, so we probably won't be able to get to
this for a bit).