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(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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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))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 23:13:15 -0700
From: Daniel Moyer <moyerd(a)usc.edu>
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] How to explain drop in random searches
Message-ID:
<CAKvQcvXcMXSc2SkDVJTTbs2MXuCSpeHcHeSd=
gWkg6bwY8DqjQ(a)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(a)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(a)gmail.com>
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 117, Issue
14
Message-ID:
<CAKt0Q=e-_=0=
aepKeSVnT0Ce2FmJZu5bNtpNnYwZV7x21A3tXQ(a)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(a)gmail.com
www.wikipediatrends.com
(775) 237-8550 Google voice
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