Dan Andreescu dandreescu@wikimedia.org wrote:
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The pageview API, which is now being integrated into the Graph extension, stats tools, iOS app, and generally making a lot of people happy, has a long history. Various members of the community have been requesting this feature with increasing fervor for over a decade. I started at WMF in 2012 and within 1 year I learned enough to be completely convinced that this was one of the most worthwhile projects we could embark on. However, at this point, we *could not* expose any kind of remotely useful data via a pageview API, for technical reasons. We overcame those reasons in October 2014, at which point it took us about 6 months to prioritize the project to actually do it.
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I have followed that process, been subscribed to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44259 which I just reread and thus rather surprised by your comment. I have never seen any technical reason mentioned in the bug. It would have been very helpful, because someone might have come up with a fix in the two years when it was "on our roadmap" un- til you overcame them.
Instead, I read for example Toby's comment at Magnus's blog (http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=173#comment-290):
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| We’ve been prioritizing and working on these projects as our | resources allow and it’s important to understand that the | team has not been idle. While we’ve done a less than stel- | lar job in communicating our progress to the community, in- | formation on what we’ve been doing is available via our | planning pages on mediawiki. In the future, we will be more | proactive in communicating with the community regarding our | goals and projects.
as meaning that there were no technical obstacles, but lim- ited resources that were directed to other projects (and ap- parently none that matched the popularity of a pageviews API). My interpretation may have been biased by Magnus's report above that:
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| Like others, I have tried to get the Foundation to provide | the page view data in a more accessible and local (as in | toolserver/Labs) way. Like others, I failed. The last it- | eration was a video meeting with the Analytics team (newly | restarted, as the previous Analytics team didn’t really work | out for a reason; I didn’t inquire too deeply), which ended | with a promise to get this done Real Soon Now™, and the gen- | erous offer to use the page view data from their hadoop | cluster. Except the cluster turned out to be empty; I then | was encouraged to import the view data myself. (No, this is | not a joke. I have the emails to prove it.) As much as I | enjoy working with and around the Wikiverse, I do have nei- | ther the time, the bandwidth, nor the inclination to do your | paid jobs for you, thank you very much.
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which seems to indicate that it was indeed a problem of WMF allocating (human) resources.
Tim