It has the look of an email or blog post
drawing attention to these pages (the so-called slashdot effect or flash crowd).
What would be interesting to know is who was looking. If they were logged-in
users, it would suggest some internal trigger (e.g. Watchlist). If they were
the public at large, you would have to suspect some external trigger. An
obvious example would be some kind of university lecture. Tell a room of 500
students to all do something related to Wikipedia and include some links to “getting
started” pages and you’d expect to see an sustained level of
interest in the published links over a week or so as the students slowly get
started on the exercise.
From:
wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chico Venancio
Sent: Tuesday, 7 August 2012 6:26
AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content
and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l]
PT-WP page view spike
Maryana, this was much after that campaign (that was in 04/2011 the
spike was in late 05 - early 06/2012).
It has been pointed out in ptwiki that all these pages are in the
sidebar, checking out the other pages from the sidebar only the main page, the
contact page and the random page link did not
have the access spike, all other pages had a similar spike.
I vote on a secret
experiment :)
--