Rob Lanphier <robla <at> wikimedia.org> writes:
In diving into a problem with logging[1], we discovered that we were unintentionally treating several special page accesses (in this case, containing included Javascript) as normal pageviews, thus throwing our pageview statistics way off. The proposed solution involves changing the way we access those Javascript requests from this form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BannerController
...to this form: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:BannerController
The problem with that is that most of the time, URLs like that *should* be logged - they are simply the result of someone using a special page. For example, search page loads (about 3% of all page loads!) go completely under the radar this way, and while some wikipedias use hacks like [1] to avoid that, it really isn't an ideal situation. Also, page edits and other actions are not logged, nor page loads for old versions of pages, or for pages linked from recentchanges, or unstable versions where FlaggedRevs are enabled.
[1] http://de.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:If-search.js&action...