User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: July 11, 2016/@comment-24473195-20160713113816/@comment-24473195-20160713153302

> As a counter-point, the stats work properly by far the majority of the time (this time it was due to the update script running into a temporary problem, which was fairly quick to fix), and they can be useful to get a sense of how a community is doing in general.

That might even be true, but as long as they are not published, and we don't have any ways of correlating those stats with anything, it is becomes about as meaningless as counting the number of visitors of a library without evaluating whether they actually do anything (e.g.  reading or researching). As a professional statistician and academic once taught me, with good understanding of stats you can make just about anything look meaningful by changing the interpretation or analysis of the data.

Even if those stats are wildly wrong due to a bug by a factor of 1000x one day, we'll never know due to the lack of context. To put it into perspective, a (small?) portion of WMF views seem to be coming from facebook bot, and bing bot.

>We do recognise that it's not very 'actionable' though, which is partly why Insights now exists.

Indeed, and like I noted insights is a great tool, although more customization would be appreciated. To give you an example, for close to a year or more I've used User:452's maintenance script User:452/MaintenanceReport which also lists categories on demand.

> I create charts showing contributions, views, pages

Those should actually be automated reports / dumps, in my opinion, not something users create periodically, see :


 * https://analytics.wmflabs.org/demo/pageview-api/


 * https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/14/pageview-data-easily-accessible/


 * https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-20&pages=Album

Wikia does have API that also outputs some page views data although details about it are somewhat hard to get.