Page views - Wikitech-l

8 Apr 2012

I'm telling people that the Swedish Wikipedia has 90-100
million page views per month or on average ten per month
per Swedish citizen. This is based on stats.wikimedia.org
(Wikistats), but is it really true? It would be really
embarrassing if it were wrong by some order of magnitude.

There is of course a difference between the language and
the country. Another measure says Internet users in Sweden
(some 90 percent of all citizens) make 16 page views to
Wikipedia per month, including all languages. Both numbers
10 or 16 make sense. But are they correct?

Wikistats also says Swedish Wikisource has 300-400 thousand
page views per month, which would be 10-13 thousand per day
on average. Knowing how small the Swedish Wikisource is (only
16,000 wiki pages + 37,000 facsimile pages), and comparing
to other Swedish language websites, I'm surprised that
Swedish Wikisource could attract even this much traffic.
Now we're at such a small scale, that reading through a
day's logfile with 13,000 lines is realistic for a human.

Is there a chance WMF could publish the logfile for Swedish
Wikisource for a typical day, with just the IP addresses
anonymized? Plus the source code that counts the number
of page views, by filtering out accesses from robot crawlers
and accesses to non-pages (like images and style sheets).

Page views for individual pages (on stats.grok.se) shows
the Main page of Swedish Wikisource is shown 120 times/day
while Recent changes is shown 160 times/day. From my own
experience, contributors are the only ones to look at
Recent changes, while they almost never look at the Main
page. If IP addresses are scrambled but not removed, the
log file should be able to show this pattern. Is it possible
to tell apart the IP addresses for contributors and
non-contributors, and present page views from each
category?

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