Just so as to not leave this without reply for longer: WMF analysts usually don't have capacity to prioritize thorough investigations of such isolated incidents, in particular if it looks unlikely that they are indicative of a more widespread underlying technical problem. Also, the two peaks mentioned in the task (from August 2018 and March/April 2018, respectively) are outside the range for which we would still have more detailed webrequest data to investigate. On the other hand, the public pageview data (e.g. in the first case above, also note that this was concentrated on mobile web only) already makes it almost certain that this was artificial traffic.

That said, the impact of such peaks on (say) the understanding of the popularity of particular article topics can be huge, and there is some value in tracking such occurrences and helping users to determine whether they are likely to be artificial. @MusikAnimal might be working to extend his existing notes into a FAQ, and we asked for the creation of a Pageviews-Anomaly tag on Phabricator to collect tickets on this matter which should facilitate coordination.

It looks like this should be documented either under Research:Page View, along with other anomalies or in another centralized spot. Moving to unprioritized/icebox for now because we won't be able to tackle it anytime soon.