Thank you, Federico!
Your link to phabricator explain this. However, it would be nice if such changes will be described in Read.me file
Alex
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 2:00 PM, < wiki-research-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: How to explain drop in random searches (Daniel Moyer)
- Re: How to explain drop in random searches (Federico Leva (Nemo))
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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