Hi,
On 11.07.2013, at 10:37, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jane Darnell, 11/07/2013 09:15:
Hmm, This one really has me stumped: http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/Yahoo! That is not a wikibump, but some sort of structural thing. The only thing I can think of is that some sort of popular band, manga character, or porn queen in China has been named Yahoo!
Or someone (e.g. Yahoo!) has linked it from some prominent webpage (but only in English? other languages seem not affected) or some stocks holder (e.g. Yahoo!) is running simple "crwalers" to skew pageviews stats and make them appear flat so that nobody can make stocks value forecasts using them.
Yupp, i also think this is a weird anomaly… the causes can be very weird though, as we found out back in 2010-11 when the views to the "initial" page were suddenly very skewed: http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/11/page-views-anomaly-in-october-resolved/#c... Domas was able to find the cause by sampling some of the requests and found that all had the same referrer. Turned out it was an online ads page that had an error in their html which tried to load the page as background image.
It's hard to analyze / clean this stuff while maintaining privacy. I remember there was a survey sent out to several (linked) open data researchers a while ago how the Wikimedia foundation could provide better stats. My reply was something along these lines: Provide more stats with every line in the hourly pageview stats: - how many different IP addresses cause the accesses (better: how many accesses per IP address (avg + stddev)) - how many different referrers cause the accesses (better: how many accesses per referrer (avg + stddev)) - how many accesses come from wikimedia IPs (toolserver, some bots) - ip address count for top 5 (or 10) originating countries (get some geolocation in)
I think the top 3 aren't really computationally expensive but would really improve our ability to clean the view stats. The 4th always was on my wishlist, but would require some more work for reverse ip->geolocation lookup.
Cheers, Jörn