In ruwiki we sometimes analyze different data for articles. And we saw several anomalous peaks of views.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Википедия:Форум/Новости#Статистика_пиков_просмотров_статей_в_2018_году
For example we can not explain the short peak 500k+ in unpopular articles:
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=ru.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2018-08-07&end=2018-08-09&pages=Городское_поселение_Одинцово
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=ru.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2018-03-31&end=2018-04-02&pages=М_(фильм,_1931)
Is it possible to somehow investigate whether it was a computer failure (сould this be a wiki-bug; maybe these views were generated by some other article and were counted for this article by bug), an attack of bots (сould this be a strange use of Wikipedia services; was it in a short time (by the hour); attack from infected devices), interest only from one country (it is unlikely that these are views from a link from another site) or something else(is it normal or not)?
In previous years, such peaks were also seen in other articles.
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a sharp start of ~300k+ views with a long ongoing period when an article has existed for a long time with a low number of views
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=ru.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&start=2018-01-01&end=2018-12-29&pages=Borderlands:_The_Pre-Sequel! <-- link with ! in the end