On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Bryan Davis <bd808@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I'm pretty sure this should be counted as a page view. As Brion notes
this is the equivalent of a page view of the
/wiki/File:Marcello_Malpighi_large.jpg page. If this doesn't count as
a page view then mobile page views shouldn't count either as they are
transformations of the canonical page as well.

AFAIK, the hash is generally not sent to the server so it (and thus the image name) won't be seen by log-based data crunching.

As such I think the issue Oliver is raising is that it would likely be counted as a page view for the article page, even though we don't know whether or not the article will actually be seen or read. However there's no way offhand to know that that page view won't result in a read of the article as well once the media viewer is dismissed. And in general, simply seeing that a data transfer was made tells us nothing about how much attention a human paid to the contents...

-- brion