[WikiEN-l] Weekly cycles to Wikipedia traffic

[Stephen Bain]

On 4/2/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> Looking at the Alexa stats for Wikipedia:
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=wikipedia.org

I prefer our own stats. The graphs are much nicer, and there's other
data (which cluster the request is to, for example) which proves
instrumental in my analysis.

This is the latest weekly graph for requests:

http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/reqstats/reqstats-weekly.png

...and here's the latest monthly graph:

http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/reqstats/reqstats-monthly.png

Note that the week (maroon line) begins on a Monday. The highest
traffic is Monday to Thursday, and sometimes to Friday, with lower
traffic on weekends. The weighted peak each day, across all clusters,
is around 12:00 to 18:00 UTC.

Take a look at the weekly graph. You'll see that the knams and
knams-img clusters peak earlier in the day, maybe 12:00 UTC, while the
pmtpa and images clusters peak later, maybe 18:00 UTC. It's hard to
see when the yaseo and yaseo-img clusters peak, but if you look
closely, they peak at maybe 06:00 UTC. Lopar doesn't make it into the
graphs

This might not make much sense until you consider that the pmtpa and
images clusters are in Florida (pmtpa stands for Powermedium, Tampa),
the knams and knams-img clusters are at Kennisnet in the Netherlands
(knams is Kennisnet, Amsterdam) and the yaseo and yaseo-img clusters
are in Seoul (yaseo is Yahoo!, Seoul).

My theory is that more people are using Wikipedia at work and during
school hours than they are in their own time. The various clusters
serve traffic closest to them at different times in the UTC day, but
always corresponding to the local middle-of-the-day period.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com