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 https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Lake/Traffic/BotDetection, but I am sure they still miss some things.
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 at 18:48, Ankan Ghosh Dastider < ankanghoshdastider@gmail.com> wrote:
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 https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/bn.wikipedia.org/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7Call%7Caccess~desktop*mobile-app*mobile-web+(agent)~user%7Cmonthly, 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 https://pageviews.toolforge.org/?project=bn.wikipedia.org&platform=desktop&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2018-01-01&end=2018-01-31&pages=%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B7%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BC%E0%A6%B6%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%A3%E0%A7%80:%E0%A6%85%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%AE%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%82%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A3) 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) User:ANKAN https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:ANKAN || All Wikimedia Foundation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation's public Wiki Executive Member || Wikimedia Bangladesh http://wikimedia.org.bd/ Twitter https://twitter.com/Iagdastider | LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankan-ghosh-dastider/ | ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ankan_Ghosh_Dastider _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics