This website is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that maintains Wikipedia and manages the Wikipedia trademark.
Views until June 2015 for desktop come from stats.grok.se and include bot pageviews, while those from July 2015 are from the Wikimedia REST API and exclude identifiable bots and spiders (but may still end up counting many views by bots and spiders as legitimate human views). Views for mobile web, mobile app, desktop spider, and mobile web spider are from the Wikimedia REST API and available starting July 2015. Mobile web and mobile app views from July 2015 onward exclude identifiable bots, and "desktop spider" and "mobile web spider" are basically all the bots/spiders (excluding Wikipedia's own, which get identified as bots).
Statistics are obtained from stats.grok.se and the Wikimedia REST API. For maximal speed and efficiency, we store the results of past queries in a local database, and we first check with our internal database before querying the stats.grok.se server. This page concentrates on what the statistics mean, building on information at the stats.grok.se about page.
Monthly data comes from daily data: The pageview count for a month is the sum of the pageview counts for all days in the month. For the current month, this includes all days that have completed (the current day is not included in statistics). There is a delay of up to 5 hours from the end of the day to the updating of statistics for the day on stats.grok.se.
Definition of day: Days are defined as days using UTC (Greenwich Mean Time) rather than in terms of the local time in the jurisdiction where the page was viewed.
We maintain only monthly data: The information we maintain on Wikipedia Views includes only monthly totals, and data that can be deduced from that. We do not retrieve, store, or process pageview counts by day. The justification is that our goal is to be a complementary service as far as possible: we hope to allow easier comparisons over longer timescales and larger numbers of pages rather than offer day-by-day comparisons.
We link to the original source (stats.grok.se or the Wikimedia REST API) for daily data: However, we do link (inline in our output tables) to the stats.grok.se page that provides the day-by-day information in graphical format. You can also get the information in a text-based format by clicking on the link to the JSON format from the graphical format page we link to.
It is possible to reconstruct hourly data from the raw dumps: Finally, it's worth noting that underlying raw dumps (pagecounts-raw, pagecounts-all-sites, and pageviews) would allow us to get the data at an hourly granularity, if we so desired. The sources we query do not serve this information in an easy-to-use manner, so you'll need to load up the dumps and process them yourself.
For a full timeline of the various dumps and how they evolved, see timeline of Wikimedia analytics. Although the page was primarily written by Issa Rice, its creation was assisted and financially supported by Vipul Naik, the creator of Wikipedia Views.
For stats.grok.se, pageviews are combined for pages that differ only in minor capitalization. So, all accesses of "Barack obama" and "Barack Obama" would be combined into a single view count. In contrast, the Wikimedia REST API is case-sensitive.
Pageviews for pages that redirect to a given page are not combined with pageviews of the page redirected to (this behavior is consistent between stats.grok.se and the REST API). For instance, the pages Arnold Foundation and Laura and John Arnold Foundation are counted separately, even though the former redirects to the latter. This is the way the Wikimedia raw data dumps, stats.grok.se, and this website treat the data.
Pages may accrue views even when they don't exist. For instance, if I visit the URL for the page Acefwemwieo, that is recorded as a pageview. Therefore, we cannot reliably infer that non-existent pages would get 0 pageviews in a given month. In particular, non-existent pages that have links pointing to them, or pages that existed earlier and were then deleted, may record a few pageviews.
Internal navigation within a page, for instance, by clicking on section titles in the table of contents, does not count as additional views of the page.
Use the following diagnostics if the pageview counts you see are anomalously low.
Check whether you spelled the page correctly, and whether it exists.
You may have selected a redirecting page name rather than the main page name. A redirecting page name usually gets some traffic, typically through internal links, but the traffic is much less in quantity than for the main page name.
In some cases, pagenames may contain unusual characters that confuse the system, either at Wikipedia Views or at stats.grok.se. If you encounter such issues, please contact us with the information. We'll look into the issue and attempt to fix it if possible.
The page may have been created after the month for which you're viewing statistics, or sometime in the middle of the month, or in the immediately preceding month (so that it didn't have time to get indexed by search engines and rise to the top of search rankings).
The page may have very few pages linking to it, and therefore not have much direct traffic or good search engine ranking.
Keep in mind that pageview counts for the current month will be lower because it's an incomplete month. You need to adjust for the number of completed days in order to compare with other months.
Use the following diagnostics if the pageview counts you see are anomalously high.
Visit the Wikipedia page and see if it's the correct one. It's highly unlikely, but still possible, that the page name you entered is a different and more popular one from the one you wanted to know about.
Click through to stats.grok.se or the Wikimedia REST API to see the day-by-day pageviews. You may be better able to identify whether the high traffic was uniform or whether it occurred on a particular day or few days in the month. You can then use other investigative tools to determine whether anything happened on those days that sparked interest in the topic.
You might like to read this blog post on the decline in Wikipedia pageviews over time, written based on data collated by Wikipedia Views. A shorter version was published on LessWrong.