This was before the April campaign,<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_editor_engagement_proje… 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 &lt;hshammaa(a)wikimedia.org&gt;wrote;wrote: -- Maryana Pinchuk Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org

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(a)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 :) -- Chico Venancio