A lot of thanks and credit to the analytics team for keeping these counts
running.
That being said, it might be a good idea not to draw too many conclusions
from the pageview counts on user behaviour without a closer analysis,
especially for the Special:* pages. As demonstrated by the October 16th
drop, these are strongly affected by instrument bias.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:56 PM, Alex Druk <alex.druk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Because similar patterns are observed for many other
languages (but not
all), it looks like R.Stuart Geiger explanation is correct: from October
16 2014 Special:Random page is just not counted any more (with some not
clear exceptions).
That’s a pity because we lost valuable source of info how Wikipedia users
look for information. Random search was (and is?) a major way users explore
Wikipedias. In many languages Special:Random was significantly higher than
Main_Page count and certainly higher than search with index.php.
(I do not want to point finger, but maybe somebody at WMF considered this
emotionally.)
IMHO, logs should be logs and log actual activity. At least such dramatic
changes in logging user’s activity should be documented somewhere. Betters
in Read.me file that should accompany raw logs.
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 20:08:40 -0700
From: "R.Stuart Geiger" <sgeiger(a)gmail.com>
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 117, Issue
14
Message-ID:
<CAKt0Q=e-_=0=
aepKeSVnT0Ce2FmJZu5bNtpNnYwZV7x21A3tXQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="utf-8"
Going from 86,000,000 a month to 31,000 a month is quite a drop, and the
shift is pretty dramatic. It goes from 1.7 million one day to 715 the next
and stays flat (
http://stats.grok.se/en/201410/Special:Random).
I was also thinking there could be a bot or something that is scraping
Special:Random, but the drop also happens for Special:Random/Talk -- which
hardly anybody uses, but it still drops flat the same day (
http://stats.grok.se/en/201410/Special:Random/Talk). It doesn't happen
for
Special:Upload or Special:Log though.
October 16th, 2014 is the day it changes. Anybody know of something that
might have changed that day with logging? Also, there have to be way more
than ~1,000 hits a day to Special:Random. Perhaps pageviews started to be
counted for the page that it got redirected to, rather than the
Special:Random page itself. But then why wouldn't it go to 0? What are
those ~1,000 hits a day?
[image: 👻] ~~ it is a mystery ~~ [image: 👻]
--
Thank you.
Alex Druk
alex.druk(a)gmail.com
www.wikipediatrends.com
(775) 237-8550 Google voice
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