This was before the April campaign,http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_editor_engagement_projects#Portuguese_Wikipedia right? Given that these were three new user help related pages, I agree with Haitham that it was probably a brief main page link or template change (most likely to the default welcome or warning message). I'd also check the history of the mediawiki message inserted into the edit window on the main page -- that could also explain it.

Was someone running a secret experiment? :)

M

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Haitham Shammaa hshammaa@wikimedia.orgwrote:

This is a sort of a frequently occurring phenomena.

One recent examples from the english Wikipedia : http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Resources_and_lists http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Resources_and_lists http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Communication http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Help:Contents/Browsing_Wikipedia

If we excluded the possibility of failure during data acquisition or data processing, it is very hard to predict the exact reasons, specially on large Wikimedia projects due to the high complexity of the site structure, and the continues changes taking place on it.

One of the general reasons for this could be adding a link at a highly accessed page (e.g. main page, welcome template, mediawiki page .. etc) or making the existing links more visible or emphasized, and then reverting these change after a few days.

Wish this was helpful.

-- Haitham Shammaa Contribution Research Manager Wikimedia Foundation

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Jessie Wild jwild@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Hello researchers near and far -

I was notified by some people from the Portuguese Wikipedia community about an anomaly in the page view statistics between May 30-June 15 for several of their help pages:

• Ajuda:Página_principalhttp://stats.grok.se/pt/latest90/Ajuda:P%C3%A1gina_principal

(Help:Contents)[1]

• Wikipédia:Página_de_testeshttp://stats.grok.se/pt/latest90/Wikip%C3%A9dia:P%C3%A1gina_de_testes(Wikipedia:Sandbox)[2]
• Wikipédia:Boas-vindashttp://stats.grok.se/pt/latest90/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Boas-vindas (Wikipedia:Welcoming

Committee/Welcome to Wikipedia)[3]

There is not a matching increase in number of page views of the main page[4], nor is there a similar spike in other language projects.

They are wondering if anyone has any thoughts on why this could be, or suggestions on ways they could answer some further questions. Has anyone seen something like this previously?

Thanks in advance for the help! Jessie

[1] http://stats.grok.se/pt/latest90/Ajuda:P%C3%A1gina_principal [2] http://stats.grok.se/pt/latest90/Wikip%C3%A9dia:P%C3%A1gina_de_testes [3] http://stats.grok.se/pt/latest90/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Boas-vindas [4] http://stats.grok.se/pt/latest90/Wikip%C3%A9dia:P%C3%A1gina_principal

-- *Jessie Wild Global Development, Manager Wikimedia Foundation*

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! Donate to Wikimedia https://donate.wikimedia.org/

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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 :)