Why do some random pages have such high view counts?

These are false positives, and unfortunately they are unavoidable. These could surface because someone used an automated program to scrape the page, for instance. One tactic to identify false positives 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 pages you believe may be false positives. 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 a false positive.

You can easily compare mobile and desktop pageviews by checking the "Show mobile percentages" option. This option is only available if you set the Platform to "All". The percentages include mobile app and mobile web pageviews.

You can report false positives to improve the Topviews data. To do this, first exclude the page from view by hovering over it and clicking the ✖ in the beginning of the line. Then click on the 'Report false positive' link above the 'Excluded pages' input to open the form. Any pages you submit will be flagged for review and may be automatically excluded from view for all users.

You can also open any page in the Pageviews app for further analysis. Just click on the view count on the right side.

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.

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.

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.