Hello Mako,
On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Benj. Mako Hill mako@atdot.cc wrote:
Users mostly read the most recent version of a given page, but from time
to
time, read accesses to the 'history' of a page happens.
At least as far as know, views to historical versions of webpages in Wikipedia don't show up in the access logs at all because certain kinds of requests (like requests to /w/index.php?oldid=NUMBER) don't get recorded in the pageview data.
I'm sorry to contradict you, but at least on the Wikibench traces, that information is very well present. I see things like:
1609418296 1190438479.078 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Western_betrayal&oldid=9828122...
That is, back in 2007, users were accessing a version of that page that dated back in 2005 or so.
New versions of a page are created as well. Finally, users might
potentially need to explore several old versions of a given web page, for example by accessing the details of its history[1].
AFAIK, viewing the history page itself is also not recorded in the page view data either.
Sorry to contradict you again, but there are indeed logs for that as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marina_Nadiradze&action=histor...
I'm quite surprised that such informations are not known by the community of Wikipedia researchers.
Best, Valerio