On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:
Does the Wikimedia Foundation's technology team have any insight or comment on the finding that (other than the Wikipedia Main Page and the "404 error" page), in September the most popular page on the English Wikipedia was "Mathematical descriptions of opacity", with over 5.1 million views? There was no discernible "bump" in interest in opacity due to outside news events or a book or movie release on the subject.
The phenomenon is outlined here: http://www.examiner.com/wiki-edits-in-national/wikipedia-s-top-10-most-viewe...
Do you think this is some sort of malicious probing activity by a hacker, or is it perhaps the deliberate testing of a developer employed by the WMF?
There seem to have been a lot of page views concentrated around September 22-26. This could be something as innocent as someone running a broken bot that's supposed to fetch lots of different articles but instead fetches the same URL again and again due to a typo in the code, or it could be as malicious as someone trying to DoS us in a very simplistic way. I'll look at the sampled logs for those days and see what I can find.
Roan