---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Zachte <ezachte@wikimedia.org>
Date: 2013/11/27
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase in page views for the last 3 months
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>


Thanks all for thinking along.

We have found the cause of the unbelievable growth in page views, and it turns out to be an bug indeed.

Around August 2013 a site change caused internal housekeeping messages to be counted as page views by our webstatscollector software.
As the patch was rolled out progressively, every month more bogus page views were added, up to several billion per month in November.

All page review reports now have a very clear warning about this issue.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm

Thanks to Christian Aistleitner for pinpointing the specific new url's that caused overcount, of up to 100 million per day in November:

Special:CentralAutoLogin/createSession
Special:CentralAutoLogin/start
../autonym.ttf

Knowing this we can patch the hourly projectcount files.
Original files: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/2013/2013-11/
Patched files: http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/projectcounts/

I'll reply on this thread when the patch has been applied.

Erik Zachte


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