Why can't I view data older than July 2015?

The Wikimedia pageviews API was introduced in August 2015 and has backfilled data to July 2015. You will have to rely on other tools such as stats.grok.se to view data older than this. Whether or not they work is unfortunately outside the scope of this tool, and beyond the control of the maintainers.

Why can't I view data for today's date?

The Wikimedia pageviews API generally takes a full 24 hours to populate, sometimes longer. In some situations you may see data missing for yesterday's date as well, which will be left blank rather than showing a count of zero views.

Why do some pages have unusually high pageviews?

If you see an inexplicable spike in pageviews, especially if it is only on specific days, it may be false traffic from an automated program. One tactic to identify bot-inflated traffic is to compare desktop views with mobile views. First see which agents are most popular on your project for all articles, and use that as a basis for comparison. For instance on the English Wikipedia mobile web views should be comparable if not higher than desktop, so if mobile web views are very low, it might be false traffic.

If you are unable to conclude it is false traffic, you can request an investigation to be done by filing a ticket on Phabricator. These pageviews anomalies are common and tedious to investigate, so do not expect a timely response.

Are pageviews by the same user counted every time?

Yes. Every time you load a page, a pageview is registered, even if you created the page. You can learn more about the pageview definition at meta:Research:Page view.

How can I see the pageviews of redirects?

To enable searching for redirects, change your search method to "Autocompletion including redirects" in the Settings panel. If you want to see the pageviews of individual redirects to a page, try Redirect Views.

How are redirects counted?

If a user browses to a redirect, a pageview is registered for the redirect but not for the target page. If you want to get the total pageviews of a page including all redirects, enable the "Include redirects" option, or use Redirect Views.

Note the "Include redirects" option can potentially slow down the tool, and edits made to redirect pages are not counted.

Can I see what geographical region the pageviews came from?

The geographic location of readers on a per-page basis is not available. This is primarily for privacy reasons. You can however see the total pageviews by country across all Wikimedia sites at stats.wikimedia.org.

Can I see how readers got to the page?

Referral information is not publicly available on a per-page basis. You can however see total referral statistics across all Wikimedia sites at discovery.wmflabs.org.

What are the dots next to the date labels?

This indicates the first day of the week. Pageviews tend to be low during the weekends, so this indicator can give perspective to the seven-day pattern.

What are the "Agents"?

• User includes all people who view a page. Editors, anonymous editors, and our readers.
• Spider includes search engine "web crawlers" like Google that read pages for the purposes of improving search results. Pages can receive significant views from web crawlers, which is why by default the tool shows data only from users.
• Automated includes automated programs that are not search engine crawlers.

How can I change the chart type?

Click "Chart type" to choose amongst 6 different types. The app will remember your preference. By default, the application will show a bar chart when viewing data for a single page, and a line chart for multiple pages. Note that the pie, doughnut and polar area charts can only show data for total number of views within the daterange.

I want to see the top viewed pages within a date range

You can find this at Topviews Analysis.

I want to see data for a page across all languages of a project

You can find this at Langviews Analysis.

Can I download the full pageviews dataset for all pages?

Yes. The full data dumps for all supported Wikimedia sites can be downloaded at dumps.wikimedia.org.

I have a feature request or bug to report

If you would like to use a wiki to provide feedback, use the feedback forum on Meta. You can also report issues on Phabricator.