I imagine most people spend more time reading on Wikipedia as opposed to trying to hover over every link available?

That's less than one API hit per 17 English pages viewed - the overwhelming majority of the time, users do not use this feature at all, based on these numbers.

This response is pure sophistry.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the pageviews are bots/crawlers. They don't hover over links.

Number was very very very wrong. Actually it's 0.5 million. I've corrected the post.

it's still shown as 5.5k in grafana. what am i missing? the unit is events per minute.

The sample size for those graphs is 1% so you need to multiple that by 100. I personally checked the access logs to check they are consistent. That was where the confusion came from!

Ah, thank you.

That was also my first reaction, but I did not mention it because judging this (in relation to pageviews) would require more knowledge about the audience, e.g. how many users are using a mouse at all (vs. a touch screen, or pure keyboard navigation).

but how many of those views are on mobile devices?

this is a desktop feature. in general, mobile traffic > desktop traffic.

we’d need wikipedia’s browsing statistics be sure, since some sites see different ratios than others. What if 1:8 wikipedia visits are on desktop? That would make the 5K/minute much more significant.

I'm thinking it has to be heavily cached.

"5000 hits to our API per minute" does not say anything about whether they're measuring in front of or behind the cache. For all intents and purposes, the cache's endpoint is the API endpoint.

And uncached hits only would be an even more worthless metric.

I, too, think either that number is wrong or this wasn't a feature available to all users.

I also agree that using this metric as affirmation the feature is liked is dangerous; count me among the many here inadvertantly contributing without enjoying the feature.