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Today's Topics:
1. Re: How to explain drop in random searches (Daniel Moyer)
2. Re: How to explain drop in random searches (Federico Leva (Nemo))
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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 23:13:15 -0700
From: Daniel Moyer <moyerd@usc.edu>
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:
<CAKvQcvXcMXSc2SkDVJTTbs2MXuCSpeHcHeSd=gWkg6bwY8DqjQ@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
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@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@gmail.com>
> >To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> >Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 117, Issue
> > 14
> >Message-ID:
> > <CAKt0Q=e-_=0=
> aepKeSVnT0Ce2FmJZu5bNtpNnYwZV7x21A3tXQ@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@gmail.com
> www.wikipediatrends.com
> (775) 237-8550 Google voice
>
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>
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 12 May 2015 09:18:54 +0200
From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki@gmail.com>
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: <5551A95E.1030107@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Alex Druk, 12/05/2015 07:56:
>>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).
That's expected. The new data excludes redirecting URLs (requests which
got a 301, 302 or 303 status code.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73790
Nemo
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