Thanks for the clarification of how redirects work, and what we should keep
in mind when trying to count pageviews. Do you know if there's a way to
find the date(s) when a page is redirected using the API? We know we can
get the 'old' page ids of redirected pages using the API, but we're not
sure if using the creation date of these page ids would be accurate. Also,
what's the difference between redirects and page moves if there is one?
We may stick to including redirects without trying to avoid overcounting as
this appears to be a more complicated issue that we thought. We are working
to collect pageviews within a specific time frame, so relative dates isn't
quite what we're looking for.
Thanks again!
Jackie, James, Junyi, Kirby
On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 10:52 AM MusikAnimal <musikanimal(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We attempted
to use the
wmflabs.org tool, but it only shows data from a
certain date
I'm assuming you want relative dates, not exact dates? You can do this by
using the range=latest-N URL parameter (where N is the number of days). See
<https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/url_structure/> and <
https://tools.wmflabs.org/redirectviews/url_structure/> for Redirect
Views. This mirrors the pvipdays parameter of the action API.
I'm sorry there is no backend for these tools, so if you need automation
you'll have to scrape it or re-implement it's logic yourself.
In the end, we are trying to get an accurate
count of view for a certain
page no matter the source.
Keep in mind that redirects can change, and historically may have not been
the "same" page. For instance, if I create the article Foo, and someone
else creates Bar, and some months later Foo is redirected to Bar. To
accurately get the views of just Bar, you'll need to somehow exclude the
time when Foo was a different article. Page moves can also cause unexpected
results (Foo is moved to Baz, Bar is moved to Foo, etc.). Finally, page IDs
can change too, say if I delete Foo, then move Bar to Foo. There isn't a
foolproof solution, it seems, but simply including redirects is usually
enough to give you what you want.
~ MA
On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 9:18 AM James Gardner via Wikitech-l <
wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,
Thanks for all the help and advice with this issue, especially with the
wmflabs tool with the redirect view tool. We'll try using that tool to
download the pageview data we need and manually filter by dates to map
redirects to the page. We'll also look into the REST API that Wiki has to
see if it can help us as well.
Thanks again,
Jackie, James, Junyi, Kirby
On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 10:58 PM Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 4:17 PM James Gardner via
Wikitech-l <
wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> We attempted to use the
wmflabs.org tool, but it only shows data from
a
> certain date. (Example link:
>
>
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=…
<https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2019-07-01&end=2020-01-25&pages=2019%E2%80%9320_Hong_Kong_protests%7CChina>
> <
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=…
>
> <
>>
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=…
>
)
There's a redirectview tool (see the "redirects" links at the bottom of
the page you linked) but it can't be filtered by date so it probably
can't
help you.
> Then we attempted to use the redirects of a page and using the old page
> ids
> to grab the pageview data, but there was no data returned. When we
> attempted to grab data for a page that we knew would have a long past,
but
> the parameter of "pvipcontinue" did
not appear (
>
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bpagevie…
> ).
> (Example:
>
>
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=j…
)
That API displays a limited set of metrics and is focused on caching and
being backend-agnostic. There is no way to get old data, pvicontinue is
for
fetching data about more pages. If you need
something more specific, you
should use the Analytics Query Service (which the other APIs rely on)
directly:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews
I think you'll have to piece the data together using the MediaWiki
redirects API and AQS.
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