Popular articles

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Fri Dec 28, 2012 9:25 am

Wikipedia's most-viewed articles in 2012 were...

According to AllThingsD, Gunnarsson gives a couple of explanations for why Facebook is No. 1. First is that people may be interested in popular Web properties, and second, users type in Facebook and mistakenly go to Wikipedia instead of the social-networking site.

Among the other top 10 most viewed pages were those for the boy band One Direction and for action movies, including "The Avengers," "The Dark Knight Rises," and "The Hunger Games."

Looking more broadly -- in the top 100 -- people were interested in all sorts of different topics, from sex to World War II to Steve Jobs. There are definite patterns with pop culture icons, like Justin Bieber and Rihanna, and movies and TV shows, like "The Amazing Spiderman" and "Game of Thrones." A few oddballs include the word "elocution," the phrase "2012 phenomenon," and a page about human penis size.

It helps to explain the popularity (persistent focus on recent pop culture) and some of the billions of hits it receives (errors).

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Fri Dec 28, 2012 1:56 pm

A while back, I used to pay Gunnarsson to develop these page-view reports, because the Wikimedia Foundation didn't find it an important-enough use of their $27 million slush fund. I would then produce a monthly story on Examiner.

However, the results started becoming completely unreliable, as unidentified bots would start ruining the natural traffic patterns and put obscure articles at the top of the list.

It's still happening with Gunnarsson's current data, as the AllThingsD article notes:

...the top German article is about cul de sac streets (called sackgasse in German), the top Italian article is about the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy,” and the top Chinese article is about Baidu (okay, that makes a little more sense).

One particularly oddball popular find, Gunnarsson pointed out, is that the Dutch Wikipedia’s top page of the year was about Hua Shan, a mountain in China. He parsed the stats and saw that the page had fewer than 10 page views per day, except for two weeks in July and August with 1 million page views per day.

So, the data is essentially meaningless. But the media soaks it up anyway, and the WMF misses yet another opportunity to provide useful statistics about how its human users are using the various Wikipedias.

Unread post by **HRIP7** » Fri Dec 28, 2012 7:22 pm

HuffPo: Top Wikipedia Articles Of 2012 Reveal More About Google Than Anything Else

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Wed Feb 06, 2013 4:46 pm

Special Signpost report.

Mentioned mostly because of this stupid Metafilter thread about it. MeFites are still on the fence when it comes to the value or accuracy of WP--to their discredit.

Also mentioned on Reddit, although barely noticed there.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Thu Feb 07, 2013 2:15 am

Quaint how The Signpost in February 2013 is finally getting around to something I was exclusively covering in July 2011.

Unread post by **HRIP7** » Wed Feb 13, 2013 2:39 am

Gizmopdo: The Biggest Wikipedia Traffic Spikes Since 2010 Prove We’re All Morbid

Over the past three years, Wikipedia member West.andrew.g bas been analyzing the weird and wonderful data traffic on the English-language Wikipedia. In the the latest edition of Wikipedia's community-managed newspaper, The Signpost, he's revealed the biggest traffic spikes on the site within that time—in the process proving that we're all morbid sports fans.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Sat Dec 14, 2013 9:24 pm

Our favorite charts of 2013
Quartz, 12 December 2013 link

The most debated topics on Wikipedia

This chart by The Economist of the most controversial Wikipedia topics (paywall) in some of the world’s major languages is an interesting lens on what different cultures hold important. Not surprisingly, religion is a big issue in Islamic countries, and sport is contentious in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking ones. A bit more intriguingly, French-speakers are the most exercised about science, Arabic-speakers about geography, and the Chinese and Japanese about film and TV. English- and German-speakers seem to argue a lot about sex, health and racial issues, as well as about history. And Israelis and Iranians have one thing in common—they’re the most political.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Tue Jan 07, 2014 8:20 pm

Wikipedia page views in downhill slide
by Gregory Kohs
Examiner, 7 January 2014 link

Yesterday, the foremost Wikipedia criticism site, Wikipediocracy.com, revealed on its blog a batch of web traffic data from the Wikimedia Foundation that is truly newsworthy: Wikipedia experienced in 2013 the first-ever year-over-year loss in page views. And this decline in readership isn't limited to just the English-language encyclopedia we know and love to mistrust. The same setbacks in page views are manifested on the French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish language versions of Wikipedia (see graphic).

Even though monthly traffic patterns on Wikipedia can take temporary dips and surges, ever since 2008 the annual page views have always exceeded the previous year -- that is, until 2013. What happened? [...]

Google has donated several million tax-exempt dollars to support Wikipedia in the past, and the Wikimedia Foundation thought that was a lovely series of gifts at the time. The Wikimedia Foundation probably thought it was in the driver's seat when it set up its new "Wikidata" project, with funding from Google. But then the following year, Google wooed away Wikidata's project director and semantic web expert, Denny Vrandecic, to come work for Google. Now, Google has figured out a way to take that same semantic Wikipedia content and "import" it directly into Google's own Knowledge Graph space, where it can be surrounded by advertisements that put money back in Google's pocket. Google's donation to the Wikimedia Foundation turned out to be more of an investment in future ad income. [...]

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Wed Jan 08, 2014 11:14 pm

Top 20 Wikipedia Searches of 2013: Users Love Game of Thrones, Bollywood
Pop Blend, 8 January 2014 link

Where would we be without Wikipedia, our go-to digital glossary? Think of all the poor high schoolers who would have to research their projects in actual encyclopedias, or the millions of TV fans forced to find plot and cast information in some dark hole on the Internet. Well lucky for them, they don’t have to. Today, more than 87 million visitors head to Wikipedia each month. Now that 2013 is over, it’s time to look back and see what the site’s most popular pages of the year were. Considering the number of weird things you can find on Wikipedia, you would expect this list (courtesy of The Telegraph) to be a bit more esoteric. Alas, with the exception of one or two surprises, it turns out we are a fairly predictable species when it comes to searching. [who cares? ...]

There are scores of articles in Google News about 2013's most popular searches in the Wikipediæ of various languages. For instance:

Hungarian Name-Days Most Popular On Hungarian Wikipedia link

The most interesting article in Magyar Wikipédia

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Thu Jan 09, 2014 2:41 pm

There were a number of stories about the top 2013 Wikipedia pages. I don't buy it, so long as "Lycos" was #13, but "twerking" wasn't in the top 20.

Kelly Martin · Unread post by **Kelly Martin** » Thu Jan 09, 2014 3:01 pm

thekohser wrote:There were a number of stories about the top 2013 Wikipedia pages. I don't buy it, so long as "Lycos" was #13, but "twerking" wasn't in the top 20.

These aren't search results, they're page views. And the source is almost certainly stats.grok.se, which itself just parses the raw data at http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/. There's a lot of strangeness in that data; for example, for this month so far Cat anatomy (T-H-L) is reportedly #13 (or #16, depending on where you look), which clearly begs reason (and is not consistent with the raw data, either). Such spuriousness has been characteristic of this data since that project initiated, though; my guess is that some troll somewhere is deliberately feeding false information into the recording mechanism used to collect this data. There are additional issues with the stats site, in that it appears to be unable to do basic math.

Twerking is #8088 for the past 90 days, despite having two orders of magnitude more page views than cat anatomy, which is supposedly #16.

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Thu Jan 09, 2014 7:58 pm

The stories about the most-viewed articles are sourced to Most viewed articles on Wikipedia 2013 link

Mancunium · Unread post by **Mancunium** » Mon Feb 17, 2014 5:03 pm

Wikipedia przez miesiąc straciła ponad milion użytkowników
Onet, 17 February 2014 link

Google-translation from Polish link

Wikipedia month lost more than one million

All the leading online publishers lost in December last year, compared with November last year, users. Most - Wikipedia, Grupa Onet-RASP and o2 Group.

According to the latest statement Megapanel / PBI group of users Wikipedia.org month to month decreased by 1.2 million to 9.9 million. Grupa Onet-RASP disappeared 437.1 thousand. users (to their 14.8 million) and the Group o2 - 420.2 thousand. (8.9 million). The leader of the Polish Internet in December last year Google Group remained with 18.8 million visitors to its Internet site (a decrease of 175.7 thous.).The study measuring audience audio and video in Megapanel joined by another publisher - Group Interia.pl. Still study stream but does not include services include O2 Group, TVN and TVP. From the results of the September part in it suspended the group Cyfrowy Polsat the IPLA

Unread post by **HRIP7** » Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:17 pm

Janette Lehmann, Claudia Müller-Birn, David Laniado, Mounia Lalmas, Andreas Kaltenbrunner: Reader Preferences and Behavior on Wikipedia

... the dominance of entertainment-related topics on Wikipedia ... reading behaviour depends less on the article quality, but more on the article topic and therefore the interests of the reader ...

Long paper. Looks juicy.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:20 pm

Figure 1 speaks volumes about what Wikipedians regard as "important". At the top right, being among the longest and the most popular articles, is the biography of Douglas Adams.

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:44 pm

EricBarbour wrote:Figure 1 speaks volumes about what Wikipedians regard as "important". At the top right, being among the longest and the most popular articles, is the biography of Douglas Adams.

The number 42 must be an extremely significant number in our culture, as it is life, the universe, and everything.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:51 pm

They say that Wikipedia is:

...written collaboratively by a large number of volunteers.

No mention of the smaller but substantial number of paid editors. I'm not sure I can trust this study now.

And if they think that "page views" is a trustworthy statistic for number of human readers...

sparkzilla · Unread post by **sparkzilla** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 7:29 pm

According to VentureBeat the most edited Wikipedia pages were:

1. Deaths in 2014 (19,324)
2. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (10,166)
2. Japanese dissidence during the Shōwa period (8,101)
4. Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa (7,644)
5. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (7,312)
6. 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict (6,485)
7. Shooting of Michael Brown (5,419)
8. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (5,147)
9. 2014 Pacific typhoon season (4,954)
10. List of works by Eugène Guillaume (4,229)

Readers will note that all but 2 and 10 are new-based pages. Of course, Wikipedia is not a newspaper.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 9:32 pm

Do they not even stop to think how insane it is that #3 and #10 are on that list?

Japanese dissidence during the Shōwa period (T-H-L)
...is the work of a lunatic editor.

And List of works by Eugène Guillaume (T-H-L)
...is the work of a lunatic editor.

sparkzilla · Unread post by **sparkzilla** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 9:46 pm

It's just part of the isn't-Wikipedia-wonderful non-analysis that passes for journalism these days. i guess the second guy likes lists, but why does a small page, like the Japanese one, have so many edits?

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 9:58 pm

How can the Japanese dissidence and the Eugène Guillaume ones have more edits than the 2014 Winter Olympics (T-H-L) and the 2014 FIFA World Cup (T-H-L)? To be fair, both were semi-protected during those respective sporting events.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 9:58 pm

sparkzilla wrote:It's just part of the isn't-Wikipedia-wonderful non-analysis that passes for journalism these days. i guess the second guy likes lists, but why does a small page, like the Japanese one, have so many edits?

Because this is the editor at work, repeatedly.

Notvelty · Unread post by **Notvelty** » Fri Dec 19, 2014 5:19 am

thekohser wrote:
sparkzilla wrote:It's just part of the isn't-Wikipedia-wonderful non-analysis that passes for journalism these days. i guess the second guy likes lists, but why does a small page, like the Japanese one, have so many edits?
Because this is the editor at work, repeatedly.

Yup. The warning signs were there from the start. :-)

Jim · Unread post by **Jim** » Fri Dec 19, 2014 1:57 pm

thekohser wrote:Do they not even stop to think how insane it is that #3 and #10 are on that list?

Japanese dissidence during the Shōwa period (T-H-L)
...is the work of a lunatic editor.

And List of works by Eugène Guillaume (T-H-L)
...is the work of a lunatic editor.

And yet, despite the compulsion for lists, List of works of lunatic editors (T-H-L) remains a redlink.
Potential there.
If constructed in the same "add 5 characters, take 3 away, add 5 characters..." fashion it could even get itself on the 2015 list.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Fri Dec 19, 2014 8:57 pm

"Deaths in 2014" isn't a newspaper-type article; it's a list of people transitioning out of the BLP category. It's scarcely surprising that there are so many edits, because things keep happening that affect it.

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Fri Dec 19, 2014 11:18 pm

Poetlister wrote:"Deaths in 2014" isn't a newspaper-type article; it's a list of people transitioning out of the BLP category. It's scarcely surprising that there are so many edits, because things keep happening that affect it.

...yet, many major daily newspapers have an obituary section.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 1:54 pm

Johnny Au wrote:
Poetlister wrote:"Deaths in 2014" isn't a newspaper-type article; it's a list of people transitioning out of the BLP category. It's scarcely surprising that there are so many edits, because things keep happening that affect it.
...yet, many major daily newspapers have an obituary section.

The articles are the obituaries. The analogy would be a newspaper supplying a list of all the obituaries it had printed during the year.

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Sat Dec 20, 2014 10:17 pm

Poetlister wrote:
Johnny Au wrote:
Poetlister wrote:"Deaths in 2014" isn't a newspaper-type article; it's a list of people transitioning out of the BLP category. It's scarcely surprising that there are so many edits, because things keep happening that affect it.
...yet, many major daily newspapers have an obituary section.
The articles are the obituaries. The analogy would be a newspaper supplying a list of all the obituaries it had printed during the year.

That makes much more sense.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Thu Jan 08, 2015 2:36 am

The top-viewed Wikipedia page for every day of 2014

Some results are odd. Because the data measure pageviews and not unique visitors, they are subject to distortion from bots, or software that requests pages programatically. A software developer could accidentally write a bot that views a page tens of thousands of times instead of once. This helps explain the very large numbers of views for random pages like Malware and “Less (Unix),” as well as the entries for articles that don’t exist, such as “O. Gabriel”.

Others can simply be attributed to the unpredictability of the internet. “Impossible colors” is the top page on January 5, with nearly 100,000 views—probably the result of this Reddit post that answers the question, “Can you name one thing that is and will remain impossible?”

Nooooo shit, Sherlock.

Johnny Au · Unread post by **Johnny Au** » Thu Jan 08, 2015 5:39 am

List of fictional colors (T-H-L) is very crufty.

thekohser · Unread post by **thekohser** » Fri Apr 03, 2015 12:04 pm

Looks like Wikipedia can no longer say "5th" or "6th" most popular site, at least when they're talking about the good citizens of the United Kingdom.

eppur si muove · Unread post by **eppur si muove** » Fri Apr 03, 2015 3:28 pm

Wikipedia - less popular with Britons than the Daily Mail as the go to web place for information... and even less reliable.

Vigilant · Unread post by **Vigilant** » Fri Apr 03, 2015 4:13 pm

thekohser wrote:Looks like Wikipedia can no longer say "5th" or "6th" most popular site, at least when they're talking about the good citizens of the United Kingdom.

The most damning part of that data is how only they and Microsoft are pigeon holed into being primarily used on the desktop.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Fri Apr 03, 2015 6:49 pm

Vigilant wrote:
thekohser wrote:Looks like Wikipedia can no longer say "5th" or "6th" most popular site, at least when they're talking about the good citizens of the United Kingdom.
The most damning part of that data is how only they and Microsoft are pigeon holed into being primarily used on the desktop.

As we all know, Wikipedia's information hits are hidden in the Google hits. Still, this is a very interesting development and will be sure to be the cause of much shrieking and excitation in San Francisco...

RfB

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Apr 04, 2015 12:41 pm

I don't think Wikipedia has ever been as popular over here as in the States, but it certainly looks as if it's slipping.

EricBarbour · Unread post by **EricBarbour** » Sat Apr 04, 2015 9:02 pm

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Dec 30, 2017 9:37 pm

Articles on Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Bitcoin are on the list of the 10 most read Russian articles on Wikipedia in 2017.

In Vietnamese Let nobody say that I leave stones unturned.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 8:42 pm

Another bit about the most popular pages.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 8:44 pm

And another; this one is about UNESCO world heritage sites.

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Sat Jan 13, 2018 9:17 pm

Poetlister wrote:And another; this one is about UNESCO world heritage sites.

Could this be some sort of correlation does not mean causality error?

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Jan 14, 2018 12:50 pm

I assume that everyone is trying to find, among the list of most popular articles, something thst appeals to their own interests.

CrowsNest · Unread post by **CrowsNest** » Sun Jan 14, 2018 1:15 pm

Poetlister wrote:I assume that everyone is trying to find, among the list of most popular articles, something thst appeals to their own interests.

Maybe. But in this case, it appears the reason for their interest is classic Eurocrat gravy train trough diving....

This pilot was run as part of the Big Data Sandbox, an international collaboration project sponsored by the High-Level Group for the Modernisation of Official Statistics, set up by the Conference of European Statisticians. It involved, besides Eurostat, several national statistical institutes and other international statistical bodies.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Mar 03, 2018 10:52 am

Bollywood’s ‘Badshah’ Shah Rukh Khan is a popular personality not only in India, but in foreign countries as well. And the latest standings of the most searched celebs on ‘Wikipedia’ is proof of this. ‘Zero’ star Shah Rukh is second most searched celeb on Wikipedia. The list has 32 names of actors from Hollywood and Bollywood and is calculated between December 2007 to December 2017. The list also features other Bollywood stars namely, Salman Khan and Sunny Leone.

http://www.freepressjournal.in/entertai ... 230885,The Freepress Journal

Yes, the headline says "the most" but the text says "second most". But this shows how important India is becoming in terms of Wikipedia use, though probably not in editing.

Unread post by **Zoloft** » Mon Mar 05, 2018 12:23 am

Poetlister wrote:
Bollywood’s ‘Badshah’ Shah Rukh Khan is a popular personality not only in India, but in foreign countries as well. And the latest standings of the most searched celebs on ‘Wikipedia’ is proof of this. ‘Zero’ star Shah Rukh is second most searched celeb on Wikipedia. The list has 32 names of actors from Hollywood and Bollywood and is calculated between December 2007 to December 2017. The list also features other Bollywood stars namely, Salman Khan and Sunny Leone.

http://www.freepressjournal.in/entertai ... 230885,The Freepress Journal
Yes, the headline says "the most" but the text says "second most". But this shows how important India is becoming in terms of Wikipedia use, though probably not in editing.

A sample of his recent work:

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Apr 28, 2018 8:40 pm

Last year lots of people were inquiring about the cryptocurrency bitcoin and the word itself was one of the topmost trending words searched in 2017 according to Google Trends data. Another area where bitcoin was searched frequently was the website Wikipedia. The website hosts a free encyclopedia that is openly editable, while educational resources are also provided in 299 different languages. Wikipedia recently published its “Annual Top 50 Report” which includes a curated list of the top fifty most popular articles on Wikipedia throughout 2017.

Bitcoin.com

Here is the Top 50 report.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 8:49 pm

When conducting research for his Master’s thesis in 2015, researcher Daniel Chong found that more than 60 percent of Malaysians read the English edition of Wikipedia as opposed to the Bahasa Malaysia and Chinese versions.

Malaysia Kini

Which is why the WMF doesn't give two hoots about most foreign language wikis.

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Sat Jul 14, 2018 11:51 pm

Can't say I am surprised. I have contributed exactly one article to the Cornish Wikipedia this year. Maybe a dozen to the Russian Wikipedia that were accepted. And over a thousand articles to the English Wikipedia.

En-wiki has more articles, more editors, more sources, and is better written. In comparison most lnguage editions are years behind and suffer with major gaps in coverage, unverifiablty and unreliability.

Poetlister · Unread post by **Poetlister** » Sun Jul 15, 2018 9:29 am

Dysklyver wrote:Can't say I am surprised. I have contributed exactly one article to the Cornish Wikipedia this year. Maybe a dozen to the Russian Wikipedia that were accepted. And over a thousand articles to the English Wikipedia.

En-wiki has more articles, more editors, more sources, and is better written. In comparison most lnguage editions are years behind and suffer with major gaps in coverage, unverifiablty and unreliability.

If you had translated all your articles into Cornish and posted them, it would presumably have had a substantial impact on the Cornish wiki. It gets to be a vicious circle; people don't bother with the other wikis and so they don't flourish. Lately I've contributed far more to the French and German wikis than the English one and they're OK (not that I'm claiming all the credit for that).

Dysklyver · Unread post by **Dysklyver** » Sun Jul 15, 2018 9:23 pm

Poetlister wrote:
Dysklyver wrote:Can't say I am surprised. I have contributed exactly one article to the Cornish Wikipedia this year. Maybe a dozen to the Russian Wikipedia that were accepted. And over a thousand articles to the English Wikipedia.

En-wiki has more articles, more editors, more sources, and is better written. In comparison most lnguage editions are years behind and suffer with major gaps in coverage, unverifiablty and unreliability.
If you had translated all your articles into Cornish and posted them, it would presumably have had a substantial impact on the Cornish wiki. It gets to be a vicious circle; people don't bother with the other wikis and so they don't flourish. Lately I've contributed far more to the French and German wikis than the English one and they're OK (not that I'm claiming all the credit for that).

Tis one of my more sensible motivations for getting unblocked. I am not entirely certain, but I think I just need to wait a very long time and ask one of the stewards for an unlock. I probably should get clarification since my global situation is not even vaguely defined. What is the appeal time for "Global lock-on-sight LTA, not globally banned" ?

Another issue with the smaller encyclopedias is what they cover. I would do better to translate articles of interest rather than articles about Russian villages for example. Undue weight takes on a whole new meaning when looking at coverage <5000 articles.

Randy from Boise · Unread post by **Randy from Boise** » Mon Jul 16, 2018 2:07 am

English WP is pretty good. I strongly suspect the Malay WP is pretty bad.

RfB