I've just spent the last 15 minutes searching Google, searching Wikipedia, and searching the news, and there is just no reasonable explanation for why the redirect page for Malapascua would suddenly get this much traffic. It went from 3,000 hits a day to about 75,000.

Was the WMF using it as a test page for diagnostic purposes?

This wormed its way into the mainstream media.

This is interesting. The spike started in April, and then jumped in June.

Here is the log of what banners were enabled on April 12, and ditto for June 1. Although it's possible they were tracking banners, I think the WMF was probably doing something else. Or it could be some weird spamlink that was propagated recently.

It would be cool if someone who is "friendly" with the Wikimedia Foundation would ask one of their tech specialists to look into this and reply with a public comment. Imagine, maybe Wikipedia is undergoing some kind of "denial of service" experiment, and a KNOWN TROLL AND CRITIC was the first to alert them to it!

I'm not a technical kinda guy, but I know that the WMF's tech folks usually only discover DDOS attacks when they examine the server logs. I imagine that it takes rather a lot to DDOS the WMF given the amount of hardware they have - probably like trying to DDOS Google.

I'm intrigued, therefore, to learn how mass-visiting one page could be a DDOS experiment. I'm not trying to be sarcastic or anything, thekohser - I'm just genuinely interested. Is this a recognised techie thing?

If they really we trying to DDoS one measly redirect, they would need a hell of a lot more than 100,000 hits each day. Wikipedia's main page gets around 5 million hits every day; even Facebook is usually about 140,000.

Almost every time I look at page view statistics there's some page or another that has an anomalous spike like this. I've never found out why this happens, but I imagine it's some sort of exploit, maybe an XSS vulnerability or something.

It's fairly difficult to DDOS Wikipedia, and while people do try they are not going to succeed if they attack the main website. It used to be possible to take Wikipedia down by attacking the mail archive server, or some other relatively unimportant public server, that also housed critical nonredundant infrastructure services, but I think they fixed that problem.

I'm inclined to think it is a misbehaving bot reloading a page.

Main:
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Malapascua_Island
1248

Redirect:
http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Malapascua
1,835,403

Clicking on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapascua instantly takes you to Malapascua_Islands and both would register the hit.

The only way to see only Malapascua is to click on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...cua&redirect=no

This is not something that can be done "accidentally" (i.e. people don't accidentally type in &redirect=no 1.8 million times) and would make lilburne's suggestion more than likely.

Has anyone noticed this in the actual article about the island:

"The name of the island translates as 'bad Christmas'."

Only it doesn't. "Mala Pascua" means bad Easter. The interesting thing about this is that in Tagalog, "Pasko" means Christmas, not Easter. But despite being in the Philippines, "Malapascua" is not a Tagalog name.

I'm not sure what ypu're getting at. Malapascua can mean either 'bad christmas' or 'bad easter', depending on the language, it seems.

"Malapascua" is clearly Spanish. "Pascua" (which means Easter) is not a Tagalog word, but "Pasko", which is a loanword from Spanish and a false friend, is, and it means Christmas. They are two different holidays.

However, it's possible that it originally meant "Christmas" in Spanish, around the time of the island's settlement by Spaniards. The original colonists who named the island "Malapascua" could have intended to name it "Bad Christmas", as the meanings of words evolve over time from the original definition.