Dan Andreescu <dandreescu(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
[…]
The pageview API, which is now being integrated into
the Graph extension,
stats tools, iOS app, and generally making a lot of people happy, has a
long history. Various members of the community have been requesting this
feature with increasing fervor for over a decade. I started at WMF in 2012
and within 1 year I learned enough to be completely convinced that this was
one of the most worthwhile projects we could embark on. However, at this
point, we *could not* expose any kind of remotely useful data via a
pageview API, for technical reasons. We overcame those reasons in October
2014, at which point it took us about 6 months to prioritize the project to
actually do it.
[…]
I have followed that process, been subscribed to
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T44259 which I just reread
and thus rather surprised by your comment. I have never
seen any technical reason mentioned in the bug. It would
have been very helpful, because someone might have come up
with a fix in the two years when it was "on our roadmap" un-
til you overcame them.
Instead, I read for example Toby's comment at Magnus's blog
(
http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=173#comment-290):
| […]
| We’ve been prioritizing and working on these projects as our
| resources allow and it’s important to understand that the
| team has not been idle. While we’ve done a less than stel-
| lar job in communicating our progress to the community, in-
| formation on what we’ve been doing is available via our
| planning pages on mediawiki. In the future, we will be more
| proactive in communicating with the community regarding our
| goals and projects.
as meaning that there were no technical obstacles, but lim-
ited resources that were directed to other projects (and ap-
parently none that matched the popularity of a pageviews
API). My interpretation may have been biased by Magnus's
report above that:
| […]
| Like others, I have tried to get the Foundation to provide
| the page view data in a more accessible and local (as in
| toolserver/Labs) way. Like others, I failed. The last it-
| eration was a video meeting with the Analytics team (newly
| restarted, as the previous Analytics team didn’t really work
| out for a reason; I didn’t inquire too deeply), which ended
| with a promise to get this done Real Soon Now™, and the gen-
| erous offer to use the page view data from their hadoop
| cluster. Except the cluster turned out to be empty; I then
| was encouraged to import the view data myself. (No, this is
| not a joke. I have the emails to prove it.) As much as I
| enjoy working with and around the Wikiverse, I do have nei-
| ther the time, the bandwidth, nor the inclination to do your
| paid jobs for you, thank you very much.
| […]
which seems to indicate that it was indeed a problem of WMF
allocating (human) resources.
Tim