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?
👻 ~~ it is a mystery ~~ 👻
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:
A reduction or alteration in automata activity, possibly? Erik's dumps contain literally no filtering for scammers or crawlers, and we're a hot locale for spammer activity.
On 11 May 2015 at 08:09, Alex Druk alex.druk@gmail.com wrote:
I just grep monthly totals from Erik Zachte http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ (grep "^en.z Special:Random ")
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 2:00 PM, wiki-research-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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- Re: How to explain drop in random searches (Oliver Keyes)
Message: 1 Date: Sun, 10 May 2015 08:30:37 -0400 From: Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] How to explain drop in random searches Message-ID:
CAAUQgdA6jVzgs3QQXVVgsh7MFthWxpD97uisDTJmjNUgZZXH5A@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Using what data?
On 10 May 2015 at 05:29, Alex Druk alex.druk@gmail.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I try to learn dynamic of random searches (Special:Random) on English Wikipedia.
From 01/2012 to 10/2014 average number of random searches per month
was
about 86 millions or about 30% of Main_Page pageviews, but from
November
2014 it drop to 31,000 per month (or 0.008% of Main_page).
How to explain such a dramatic drop? Any ideas?
-- Thank you.
Alex Druk, PhD wikipediatrends.com alex.druk@gmail.com (775) 237-8550 Google voice
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-- Thank you.
Alex Druk alex.druk@gmail.com (775) 237-8550 Google voice
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