> right?
> Given that these were three new user help related pages, I agree with
> Haitham that it was probably a brief main page link or template change
> (most likely to the default welcome or warning message). I'd also check the
> history of the mediawiki message inserted into the edit window on the main
> page -- that could also explain it.
>
> Was someone running a secret experiment? :)
>
> M
>
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Haitham Shammaa
> <
hshammaa@wikimedia.org>wrote:
>
>> This is a sort of a frequently occurring phenomena.
>>
>> One recent examples from the english Wikipedia :
>>
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Resources_and_lists
>>
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Resources_and_lists
>>
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Communication
>>
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Browsing_Wikipedia
>>
>> If we excluded the possibility of failure during data acquisition or data
>> processing, it is very hard to predict the exact reasons, specially on
>> large Wikimedia projects due to the high complexity of the site
>> structure,
>> and the continues changes taking place on it.
>>
>> One of the general reasons for this could be adding a link at a highly
>> accessed page (e.g. main page, welcome template, mediawiki page .. etc)
>> or
>> making the existing links more visible or emphasized, and then reverting
>> these change after a few days.
>>
>> Wish this was helpful.
>>
>> --
>> Haitham Shammaa
>> Contribution Research Manager
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Jessie Wild <
jwild@wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello researchers near and far -
>>>
>>> I was notified by some people from the Portuguese Wikipedia community
>>> about an anomaly in the page view statistics between May 30-June 15 for
>>> several of their help pages:
>>>