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Massive spike in pageviews for a few enwiki pages beginning with "Index"
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Description

Over the past few days, three pages, Index, Washington, Index (economics), and Index (statistics), have gone from a few hundred views per day to a few hundred thousand (pageviews tool). There's no obvious reason for these three pages to get a genuine traffic spike, and there has been no corresponding spike in edits to the page that you might expect from their subjects becoming suddenly popular. Filtering page views to automated views shows a similar spike, although the numbers involved are much smaller.

Notably, this isn't a spike for everything linked from Index: Index, Virginia, which is linked from the same page, still only has a couple views per day (pageviews tool).

Event Timeline

kzimmerman subscribed.

I've associated this with the ticket about improving automated detection - T280565

We have investigated several instances of this kind of traffic spike - as Olga and Luke mentioned, most recently in T328127. It's time-intensive to dig into the web request data, and we have not found new insights to guide decisions. In addition, the traffic spikes noted here have since returned to baseline levels (pageviews link - 90 days through 2023-03-06). For those reasons I am declining this task.

index_pageview_spikes.png (1×1 px, 990 KB)