Page view stats we can believe in - Wikitech-l

13 Feb 2013

I stumbled on the Danish Wiktionary, of all projects.
Danish is the 68th biggest language of Wiktionary, and
has a little more than 8,000 articles in total.
Most of these articles are very short and provide no
value to a reader. There is no reason to link to them,
and so very unlikely that the next user should stumble
upon them unless they are me.

Yet, wikistats tries to make be believe that this tiny
project has 400,000 or 500,000 page views each month,
and has had so for a long time,
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm

(I'm not talking about January 2012, which seems to have
been an error, and reports 2-3 times that many views.)

My guess is that da.wiktionary has 4,000 page views per
month, not 400,000. It's more likely that 400,000 is
some background noise, an offset number that should be
subtracted from the number of page views for any project.

If you look at the log files for just one day, you should
see my IP address (85.228.something) and 3-4 other users
who have been editing lately, and not many more people,
but perhaps a bunch of interwiki bots.

We need an explanation to these vastly inflated page view
statistics.

-- 
   Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se