[HN Gopher] Wikipedia daily most viewed pages
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Wikipedia daily most viewed pages
        
       Author : secondary_op
       Score  : 272 points
       Date   : 2023-12-30 07:22 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (pageviews.wmcloud.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (pageviews.wmcloud.org)
        
       | error9348 wrote:
       | Would have never guessed mobile percentage is this high.
        
         | dangwu wrote:
         | A lot of these pages look movie related, so it's likely people
         | looking stuff up on their phones after watching something.
        
         | ProxCoques wrote:
         | I make it 88% mobile web, 9% desktop, 3% mobile app (why
         | Wikipedia wastes money on a mobile native app is beyond me, but
         | hey).
        
           | riversflow wrote:
           | Its one of my absolute favorite apps on my iPad. The app has
           | a widget that tells you the top articles in the last 24h and
           | the number of views. Very interesting "news" source.
        
           | sgt wrote:
           | Surely 3% of total traffic for something like Wikipedia
           | (hyperpopular) is well worth the investment?
        
             | ProxCoques wrote:
             | Only if they think that 3% would not otherwise use
             | Wikipedia. But in reality that 3% would just use the web
             | app instead, no? In fact if they put a web link in the app
             | store, would anyone even notice the difference?
             | 
             | OT I know, but I really don't get the whole native app
             | thing, particualry for non-profits or charities.
        
               | sgt wrote:
               | But then you don't understand charities... that money has
               | to be spent. And also builds competence. Maybe 3% now,
               | but with a goal of 10%? Then we are talking millions of
               | people.
        
               | ProxCoques wrote:
               | Not sure I follow. Regardless of competence or whether
               | "money has to be spent", if that 3% did not have a native
               | mobile app to download, they would just use the mobile
               | web app instead. Why not spend the money on the non-
               | native offering and make that better?
        
               | sgt wrote:
               | Well, hard to say without knowing what goes on inside of
               | the Wiki foundation, but I assume their ambition is to
               | continue growing the native app. After all, most people
               | prefer a native app feel (they don't necessarily always
               | use it though - partly due to apps sometimes not reaching
               | their true potential, and sometimes due to discovery is
               | harder).
        
         | ggm wrote:
         | Most economies predominantly use mobile devices. We're
         | atypical. Actually, almost all my non work usage is tablet so
         | maybe I am typical.
        
         | Sharlin wrote:
         | Good opportunity to reflect upon all the other ways that one
         | (and one's social bubble) might not be as typical as they might
         | think.
        
       | issung wrote:
       | Anyone have any idea why this one is at the top today with almost
       | double the 2nd entry?
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Dee_Dee_Blanchard
       | 
       | EDIT: Ah, her daughter was released from prison today.
       | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67833339
        
         | Vecr wrote:
         | Killer got out of jail.
        
           | jurmous wrote:
           | Maybe you should read the related Wikipedia article.
        
         | casperb wrote:
         | I had the same question. Seems like the perpetrator (her
         | daughter?) was released from prison yesterday:
         | https://www.google.com/search?q=Dee+Dee+Blanchard&sca_esv=59...
        
           | VBprogrammer wrote:
           | I'm surprised none of you have heard of the story. It was
           | subject to a pretty interesting dramatisation only a year or
           | two ago.
           | 
           | She may have killed her mother but doing so was not too far
           | from self defense in my mind.
        
             | casperb wrote:
             | I live in the Netherlands, probably not talked about over
             | here. But second, I try to avoid the news. Glad I missed
             | this one :)
        
             | stavros wrote:
             | She _didn 't_ kill her mother, though. She had someone else
             | do it. I guess that's the problem, and I think he's still
             | in prison.
        
               | VBprogrammer wrote:
               | Yeah, that's true. Also the preplanning aspect of it. I
               | think if she'd have just snapped and killed her mum
               | herself it wouldn't have gone to court. But someone who
               | lived through that doubtlessly had a strange view of the
               | world so judging her behaviour though any rational lens
               | is probably slightly unfair.
        
           | lupusreal wrote:
           | Seems like she (daughter) planned it or at least provided the
           | weapon, but the person who actually did it was her boyfriend
           | and is now serving life without possibility of parole. Kind
           | of a crazy sentence considering the 'victim' truly had it
           | coming (tortured her daughter for years, with unnecessary
           | surgeries, feeding tube, etc)
        
             | londons_explore wrote:
             | > unnecessary surgeries
             | 
             | I hope the doctors involved got a decent reprimand for that
             | too...
        
               | OJFord wrote:
               | The only example of surgery I saw was Botox for and then
               | removal of the saliva gland, after the mother induced
               | drooling by applying an anaesthetic prior to the doctor's
               | examination.
               | 
               | So yes there's some suspicions not reported or not well
               | followed through on by some doctors and police, but it's
               | clearly not that cut and dry, it was quite a fraud.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | The Wikipedia page also mentions that "Tubes were
               | implanted in her ears to control her myriad purported ear
               | infections".
        
               | OJFord wrote:
               | I missed that one, but my point wasn't that there was
               | only one - it was that the mother was lying about things,
               | doing deliberate fraudulent things to get that medical
               | attention and treatment for the daughter.
               | 
               | For the ear infection, maybe she just lied that the
               | daughter kept complaining of hot itchy ears etc., or did
               | something to them so that she _did_ poke and scratch them
               | (and the doctor could see that).
        
         | thret wrote:
         | But her boyfriend got life in prison.
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | Quite a read though...
        
         | incompatible wrote:
         | I assume that plenty of people were released from prison today:
         | it doesn't explain why so many people want to look up this one.
        
           | episteme wrote:
           | It makes sense once you've read the article. Not everyday a
           | person who has been through something so unusual and awful
           | with multiple media interpretations gets released.
        
         | gardenhedge wrote:
         | That page reads like a blog or a murder novel, not a wikipedia
         | article
        
           | jabroni_salad wrote:
           | That happens to basically everything the true crime followers
           | get their hands on. They are all about narrative.
        
       | casperb wrote:
       | Fascinating how many pages in the top 20 of today of topics I
       | have never heard of. Seems like a great way to see what is being
       | talked about in the culture, without depending on the news?
        
         | Hamuko wrote:
         | Well, it's at least somewhat of a representation of the
         | collective consciousness in the English-speaking part of the
         | world. Perhaps less so for the rest of the world.
        
           | casperb wrote:
           | Yes, but you can switch the Wikipedia site. I am from the
           | Netherlands and I also checked the Dutch wiki, and over there
           | I also found some interesting articles I did not know about.
        
             | Hamuko wrote:
             | Yeah, but that also requires your local edition of
             | Wikipedia to be good and useful, which is not always the
             | case.
        
           | 8bitsrule wrote:
           | Top title at this moment is 'Vijayakanth', Indian actor-
           | politician who died on Dec. 28. Pageviews not broken-down by
           | region but probable that isn't English-speaking interest.
        
             | Hamuko wrote:
             | Aren't there like 120 million people in India who speak
             | English, with about 80 million who have it as their first
             | or second language?
        
               | 8bitsrule wrote:
               | Good point. I just checked the Hindi page (https://pagevi
               | ews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=hi.wikipedia...) and
               | the top #views there is 15,500. He was an actor since
               | 1952, died of COVID, and Modi was among the thousands
               | condoling. (Maybe the HI. site isn't so useful.)
        
               | abhinavk wrote:
               | He was from a Tamil-speaking state of India and not so
               | commonly known in other regions. But Tamil Wikipedia page
               | also has just 30K views compared to English's 350K.
        
         | vladms wrote:
         | As another post exemplifies, at least some of these pages are
         | results of people seeing the news and looking something related
         | on Wikipedia. So this, gets you a filter of "what are many
         | people looking after reading the news". Wonder if it is an
         | improvement from scanning the actual news titles...
        
           | casperb wrote:
           | Yeah, I thought of the same after posting. Maybe it can
           | surface items that go around in specific groups that are
           | being ignored by the media, but most seem to be also big in
           | the news.
        
         | throwitaway222 wrote:
         | I noticed "Reacher (TV Series)" showed up. I guess we finally
         | have a way to figure out what people are watching....
        
           | paraselene_ wrote:
           | Most likely because 2nd season just dropped recently.
        
       | thrdbndndn wrote:
       | Huh, didn't know they finally migrated all the tools to a
       | centralized place, wmcloud.org.
        
       | Fuzzwah wrote:
       | A few more filters would be great. Being able to exclude
       | movies/tv/etc would take this from interesting to useful (IMHO).
        
       | katamarimambo wrote:
       | Cookie (Informatique) is always the daily most viewed page in
       | french, and by large margin. This does not seem to be the case
       | for any other language. I wonder why
        
         | casperb wrote:
         | Maybe some big website refers to that page in their cookie
         | banner?
        
         | Biganon wrote:
         | My guess would be that every French government website uses the
         | same cookie banner and it includes a link to the Wikipedia
         | article
         | 
         | Mmmh... biscuits...
        
           | hashar wrote:
           | We have that filed in our bug tracker back in July 2022 and
           | when I looked at the issue (
           | https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T313114#8093706 ) almost
           | all of the traffic came from a handful of IP addresses. Thus
           | it is most probably some kind of probe, maybe to check
           | whether internet is reachable.
           | 
           | As a result of the bug above, the entry is filtered out when
           | post processing, but the page view dataset used for
           | https://pagevews.wmcloud.org/ relies on the raw aggregated
           | data.
        
       | np_tedious wrote:
       | Are people really reading Youtube, pornhub, facebook, Instagram
       | pages this frequently or are these misclicks from search result
       | page?
        
         | teaearlgraycold wrote:
         | Bingo
        
         | secondary_op wrote:
         | Yeah, try choosing Platform: Mobile app
         | 
         | https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia...
        
         | phyphy wrote:
         | I do it. I don't know how to explain why but these pages
         | sometimes contain more information than people think. Like the
         | critics, key-people, government involvement, controversies,
         | etc. And the best part is that I can trust this information to
         | be neutral and factually correct.
        
           | avarun wrote:
           | > And the best part is that I can trust this information to
           | be neutral and factually correct.
           | 
           | Relatively compared to other sources, sure, but not
           | absolutely. Wikipedia supereditors have their own biases that
           | are obvious when reading articles on topics one has expert
           | knowledge on.
        
             | berkes wrote:
             | What other accessible resources are there that would give a
             | higher neutrality, and factual correctness?
             | 
             | (I include "accessible" deliberate, because while I like
             | reading scientific papers, they are hard to read and often
             | difficult to get or impossible to find)
        
               | AlbertRosen wrote:
               | You can find most scientific papers on Sci-hub.
        
             | carschno wrote:
             | Obviously, Wikipedia editors are human too. As opposed to
             | most other resources, however, Wikipedia has the primary
             | goal to provide high quality information. The contributors
             | are not perfect, but they come astonishingly close to
             | achieving that goal.
             | 
             | Of course, you should never blindly trust any source, but
             | in spite of the simple fact that every author has their own
             | "biases", Wikipedia's general level of trustworthiness
             | exceeds that of most other internet resources by far.
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | > Wikipedia's general level of trustworthiness exceeds
               | that of most other internet resources by far.
               | 
               | This can be true of technical articles, especially
               | covering popular subjects which are likely to be reviewed
               | by enough people that errors get removed.
               | 
               | Anything even tangentially related to politics is
               | hopeless.
        
               | jl6 wrote:
               | Not completely true. There are two different types of
               | political articles: 1) Those where two opposing edit-
               | warring factions have battled each other into a
               | compromise/stalemate, resulting in a passably neutral
               | article, and 2) Those where a single aligned group of
               | edit-warriors have gained supremacy and have come to
               | gatekeep the article against any opposing perspectives.
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | It's worse than that. It affects the entire site. Here's
               | an example:
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(automobile_manuf
               | act...
               | 
               | > "GM, for instance, at one time picked up the entire
               | cost of funding health insurance premiums of its
               | employees, their survivors and GM retirees, _as the US
               | did not have a universal health care system_. "
               | 
               | This is an article about automakers. The reason they
               | picked up future healthcare costs is because they're
               | _future_ healthcare costs, which lets the bosses pay
               | themselves bonuses from current profits and then the
               | company can go bankrupt from unfunded future obligations
               | after they 've moved on to another company. The reason
               | isn't that the US doesn't have a universal healthcare
               | system, and even if it did, they could have provided
               | supplemental insurance etc., and would still have wanted
               | to because that too is a future cost instead of a present
               | day one.
               | 
               | The reason that qualifier is there is as a dig against
               | the US healthcare system, in a way that aligns with
               | particular partisans. The opposing partisan might have
               | inserted something like "as the US has high healthcare
               | costs as a result of regulatory dysfunction" though of
               | course neutrality would have been to say neither of them
               | because it's an article about automakers rather than
               | healthcare systems.
               | 
               | And yet it's there, and that kind of thing is all over
               | the place.
        
               | avar wrote:
               | You're only reading that as a political jab because
               | you're too entranced in American partisan politics.
               | 
               | Americans are a minority among the portion of the world's
               | population that can read English easily enough to consult
               | the English language Wikipedia.
               | 
               | When doing so, the rest us can use a brief reminder of
               | what's ultimately a rather quaint aspect of the US: The
               | fact that healthcare costs are a significant concern of
               | employers.
               | 
               | The source cited for the paragraph you're picking apart
               | is an article that's contrasting US automakers and their
               | international competition.
        
               | seabass-labrax wrote:
               | I think you're on the right track here. For instance, I
               | have no idea whether or not Brazil has a universal
               | healthcare system, so if the article was about a company
               | in Brazil, such a note would be relevant to me. The USA
               | population includes approximately between a quarter and a
               | half of the world's English speakers, depending on
               | whether you count English as a second language or not.
               | Therefore it's reasonable to assume that the majority of
               | English speakers won't have a personal connection to the
               | USA or necessarily have knowledge of their politics.
               | 
               | As for this specific article about the Big Three, the
               | statement in question was added by user GoldDragon[1],
               | who was banned for 'sock-puppetry' in 2011 and, by their
               | edit history, appears to have hailed from Ontario,
               | Canada.
               | 
               | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Three
               | _(automo...
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | > For instance, I have no idea whether or not Brazil has
               | a universal healthcare system, so if the article was
               | about a company in Brazil, such a note would be relevant
               | to me.
               | 
               | The problem with this theory isn't just that it's much
               | more widely known internationally that the US has a
               | private insurance system, it's that that is already
               | implied by the rest of the sentence. US employees getting
               | their healthcare coverage from their employer means that
               | they're not getting it from the government. Specifically
               | calling it out is to make a political point.
               | 
               | > As for this specific article about the Big Three, the
               | statement in question was added by user GoldDragon[1],
               | who was banned for 'sock-puppetry' in 2011 and, by their
               | edit history, appears to have hailed from Ontario,
               | Canada.
               | 
               | This is proving my case. You don't need sock puppets if
               | your modus operandi is to make neutral edits.
               | 
               | And being from Canada doesn't imply non-partisanship --
               | "the US should have a universal healthcare system" is a
               | common political opinion in Canada.
        
               | canarypilot wrote:
               | Removing context to make a selective argument is
               | intellectually dishonest.
               | 
               | The article contrasts the operating environment of "Big
               | Three" auto-manufacturers across countries. It compares
               | manufacture costs in Germany and Japan with those in the
               | US, and the paragraph you cite links through to a (2004)
               | article in which it is estimated that pensions and health
               | insurance combined add $1,784 to the cost of a car in the
               | US.
               | 
               | You need to subtract some contradictory numbers in the
               | article to come to a number you can ascribe to health
               | insurance, but somewhere between $400 and $800 fits a
               | quoted "$900 will flow to [pension] funds".
               | 
               | Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General
               | Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive
               | disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a
               | result of the US having no universal healthcare system.
               | 
               | Lamentably for your position, just because there are
               | political decisions involved that bring about
               | consequences, factual discussion of those consequences is
               | not itself necessarily political.
        
               | AnthonyMouse wrote:
               | > Given this context it is reasonable to argue that
               | General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a
               | competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or
               | Germany as a result of the US having no universal
               | healthcare system.
               | 
               | Japanese and German carmakers also make cars in the US.
               | The primary distinction isn't that the company has to
               | provide healthcare, which they all do, and even if they
               | _were_ manufacturing in different countries they still
               | would because someone would have to pay the taxes that
               | pay for healthcare instead of the insurance premiums. The
               | primary distinction is that foreign automakers have non-
               | union shops in the South whereas domestic automakers have
               | union shops in and around Detroit, and management
               | discovered that promising generous future benefits is a
               | way to placate the UAW without cutting into present-day
               | profits, with rather deleterious consequences for the
               | company 's future.
               | 
               | This still has nothing to do with the healthcare system
               | except insofar as it was a category of future benefit
               | that could be promised. The same thing would have
               | happened (and did) by promising future pension payments
               | or other benefits. The proportionality of healthcare vs.
               | pension payments and other benefits wouldn't have
               | materially affected the result, they'd have just been
               | promised more of something else.
        
             | aierou wrote:
             | Moreover, Wikipedia relies heavily on news articles as
             | sources. It goes without saying that news outlets are not
             | well known for holding neutral positions.
        
           | adlpz wrote:
           | > And the best part is that I can trust this information to
           | be neutral and factually correct.
           | 
           | Excuse me, what?
           | 
           | Wikipedia is great. But assuming it's _neutral and factually
           | correct_ is delusional.
           | 
           | Like with every single organization made up of human beings,
           | power dynamics and censorship are part of Wikipedia.
           | 
           | It's still the less bad one, but no one should trust it
           | _that_ blindly.
        
             | curtisblaine wrote:
             | Is it even "the less bad one"? I guess it's not if you're
             | on the wrong side of censorship.
        
             | jstummbillig wrote:
             | Trust is a concept around personal choice and not facts.
             | The feeling that you can trust something _is_ what trust
             | is.
             | 
             | For different people to get to that feeling means different
             | things. A lot of people place trust in certain figures of
             | authority, in politics or on social media. The reasons for
             | which they do so differ wildly and very often have very
             | little to do with ground truth (although I suspect most
             | people would find that hard to admit).
             | 
             | When somebody says they can trust Wikipedia to be factually
             | correct that mostly is a reflection of choices and what
             | they believe helps them to navigate the world, in a way
             | that is manageable and reasonable to them. Given that time
             | is always a constraint to a varying degree, I think you
             | could do a lot worse if being less wrong is your goal.
        
             | carschno wrote:
             | You might have an absolutist view on the meaning of
             | neutrality. Of course, you can argue philosophically that
             | absolute neutrality does not exist in theory. What
             | Wikipedia does achieve in practice, though, is a very
             | successful attempt to provide balanced and well researched
             | information on an incredible number of topics.
             | 
             | The inevitable occasional mistake does not bring it down to
             | the level of arbitrary internet resources.
        
               | somenameforme wrote:
               | Wikipedia, unlike more classical encyclopedias such as
               | e.g. Britannica, is not a primary source, by design. On
               | anything tangentially related to topics like politics
               | it's obligated to rely on sources like the US media which
               | make no effort to even feign neutrality or balance. And
               | of course these sources are then cited by editors who,
               | similarly, have little interest in even feigning balance,
               | beyond some minimal pretext.
               | 
               | The ideal of checks and balances keeping the system
               | relatively neutral would only work if there was a
               | relative balance of ideological views among overactive
               | editors. And on that, I'm reminded of that line from the
               | Blues Brothers, 'We have all types of music here -
               | country _and_ western! '
        
               | bazoom42 wrote:
               | Brittanica is not a primary source either. Encyclopedias
               | are considered tertiary sources. Encyclopedias are not
               | supposed to perform original research but to aggregate
               | and condense information from secondary sources.
               | 
               | What sources do you think Britannica can use which are
               | not available to Wikipedia?
        
         | fifilura wrote:
         | I think it could be some browser configuration, that your
         | search setting points towards wikipedia.
         | 
         | So that if you write "youtube" without the .com the browser
         | will direct you to wikipedia instead.
        
           | ImaCake wrote:
           | I could see iOS safari doing this. It often has a suggested
           | page when you type in the search/URL bar.
        
           | narag wrote:
           | Yes and also there are many that never use the address bar,
           | they just google names. With this mindset, any text input
           | with a lens icon is a way to reach pages... or sites... apps,
           | stuff, whatever.
        
         | rich_sasha wrote:
         | People may be looking up details about these sites.
         | 
         | Also, not for these specifically, but if someone tells me about
         | a website I haven't heard of, and not sure if safe / SFW etc
         | I'll usually checkout it's Wikipedia page first.
        
           | atomicfiredoll wrote:
           | They may be, but are this many people really looking up
           | details about 2017's XXX: Return of Xander Cage? "XXX" makes
           | a couple other appearances on the list, so I'm inclined to
           | believe there really is a good amount of traffic being
           | directed to Wikipedia by accident from search users.
        
         | 55555 wrote:
         | "Pornhub" alone gets 441 million searches monthly. A lot of
         | people probably decide to randomly read the Wikipedia page.
        
         | notatoad wrote:
         | given the position of "sex" and "xxx" on the list, it seems
         | like it's either misclicks, or just the worldwide population of
         | teenage boys searching for things and ending up on wikipedia,
         | probably because the site they're actually trying to get to is
         | blocked.
        
       | helsinkiandrew wrote:
       | Some strange entries - obviously news, sports, movies and current
       | events will drive views but for the November 2023 monthly figures
       | why are people reading about YouTube (3rd).
       | 
       | I couldn't find views by country broken down anywhere? I wonder
       | how much of the Cricket world cup views are coming from India?
        
         | 7373737373 wrote:
         | Maybe they go accidentally on that page after searching for
         | youtube on google/in their address bar?
        
           | spacemark wrote:
           | Does the Google info sidebar ping Wikipedia every time
           | "YouTube" is queried? Would that show up in these statistics?
        
             | avarun wrote:
             | Google is certainly caching those results on their own
             | servers.
        
           | ngc248 wrote:
           | yep ... this is most likely the reason ... happened to me a
           | lot of times
        
       | reducesuffering wrote:
       | Nothing like Jeffrey Dahmer being #1 for the year and Andrew Tate
       | rounding out the top 25 to restore your faith in humanity. /s
        
         | secondary_op wrote:
         | It is not that bad (hint: check Logarithmic scale)
         | 
         | https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedi...
        
       | ulrischa wrote:
       | Who looks at the pornhub page at wikipedia?
        
         | Biganon wrote:
         | People who type "pornhub" into Google and then misclick because
         | they're unzipping at the same time
        
       | krick wrote:
       | Why is "Skathi (moon)" 12-th most popular in 2022?
        
         | r721 wrote:
         | Related /r/wikipedia/ discussion:
         | 
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/167xb3t/does_any...
        
       | tjpnz wrote:
       | Why does a rapper who's been dead for years occupy the eighth
       | position?
       | 
       | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXTentacion
        
         | LAC-Tech wrote:
         | I don't know much about rap, but I do know that dying young
         | makes you very popular. When I was a teenager it was tupac.
        
         | Jerrrry wrote:
         | As long as he's on the list, he's not dead.
        
         | Springtime wrote:
         | Possibly the same reason why half a dozen other most popular
         | pages (for all periods) have 'XXX' in them--from those Vin
         | Diesel films (one of which holds the 18th most visited in
         | Yearly), to a beer brand.
        
         | a1o wrote:
         | That along with the other triple X in the searches makes me
         | think about high hormones teenager trying to search for
         | something specifically and they have parental controls on their
         | computer.
        
         | 312c wrote:
         | He has a large and fanatical fanbase despite having trapped his
         | pregnant girlfriend in a room and beating her so severely her
         | eyes swelled shut (which he would later brag about)... while
         | out on bail for breaking into someone's house, pistol whipping
         | them, and robbing them.
        
       | xymostech wrote:
       | 2 days ago (12/27), "Web Hosting Service" was the most common
       | page visited, with <0.1% mobile (compared to >70% for the rest of
       | the top 10). Did something happen that would cause this? Or is
       | this a bot farm that's visiting wikipedia? Odd.
       | 
       | Edit: Looks like there were also around 3m "automated" views to
       | the page based on user agent. Maybe some bot script went awry but
       | used non-bot user agents half the time?
        
       | secondary_op wrote:
       | I was trying to find about public interest in Christmas and found
       | these tools, if you know any other feel free to share.
       | 
       | There is also different tool that allows to plot wiki page views
       | across many languages over time, [1] Google trends was also
       | useful [3] (hint: click Include low search volume regions)
       | 
       | Another interesting tool shows the pageviews geographic
       | distribution across all languages to all Wikipedias, but has not
       | been updated for years [2]
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://www.wikishark.com/?text_search=&values=9264937%2C245...
       | 
       | [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WiViVi
       | 
       | https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/animations/wivivi/wivi...
       | 
       | https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPage...
       | 
       | [3]
       | https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Noel,Wei...
        
         | kubanczyk wrote:
         | Off-topic fact about your first ([1]) plot: more Russians
         | celebrate Christmas on January 7th (Orthodox Church) than on
         | December 25th.
        
       | nr11_bullseye wrote:
       | Interesting that the 31st and 34th entries "gingering" and
       | "figging" were both linked in a popular reddit thread yesterday:
       | https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/m7x0zo5XzU
        
         | mxmbrb wrote:
         | That's a dead end link. Try to create an archive.org link.
        
         | DougEiffel wrote:
         | After thinking about it, those results are probably so high up
         | because people are misspelling "fingering."
        
           | inemesitaffia wrote:
           | gingering is a word somewhere I know
        
         | JeremyNT wrote:
         | Fixed link:
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/18tpie2/til_...
        
         | phatskat wrote:
         | Shout out to the Behind the Bastards episode - The Ballad of
         | Eel Horse
         | 
         | https://open.spotify.com/episode/1LT2cR70h366WwTzVZs2VB
        
       | wildekek wrote:
       | Looking at the November stats, you could conclude that the
       | average internet user is a 20-year old Indian kid that likes
       | cricket and porn.
        
         | ta8903 wrote:
         | You mean median, and that is probably a fact.
        
           | nojvek wrote:
           | Since Wikipedia is likely banned in China, we don't get those
           | stats reflected.
           | 
           | Both are ~1.5B population countries
        
       | kapitanjakc wrote:
       | The reason of so many entries being made up of "Indian
       | interests", is because the cheap internet provided by Reliance
       | Jio.
       | 
       | Purely speculation on my part, but I have seen more internet
       | presence of Indian public after Reliance Jio.
       | 
       | That and affordable or cheap even Android phones being easily
       | available.
       | 
       | As there's 1.4 billion of us, it was bound to happen at some
       | point, but I think Reliance Jio's cheap internet and easily
       | available smartphones are the catalyst.
        
         | bobsmooth wrote:
         | I wonder what the results would look like without the Great
         | Firewall of China.
        
           | kccqzy wrote:
           | Not much different if you are still counting the English
           | Wikipedia.
        
             | kiba wrote:
             | There are billion of people in China. If you grant only
             | 0.1% of 1.4118 billion can speak and read English, that's
             | 1,411,800 individuals.
             | 
             | However, if we take Wikipedia's claim at face value, it's
             | actually ten million.[1]
             | 
             | 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Engli
             | sh-s...
        
               | OJFord wrote:
               | 'can speak and read a second language' doesn't mean
               | they'd cause significant traffic to Wikipedia in that
               | second language, that number would be some small fraction
               | of that again.
        
         | epipolar wrote:
         | Although Jio was the one to trigger a step change in pricing,
         | other telecom players eventually _had_ to offer data plans at
         | competitive rates. I wouldn 't attribute these numbers to Jio
         | alone, instead to generally cheap internet in India
        
           | kapitanjakc wrote:
           | Yup, very much agreed, as I said Jio was the catalyst.
        
         | londons_explore wrote:
         | The cost of my internet connection has little bearing on how
         | much I browse Wikipedia.
         | 
         | Even YouTube I watch with little regard to internet cost, since
         | on 144p it's only 100 MB for an hour of video. Obviously I do
         | pay attention to the quality setting, because the bill can get
         | huge fast if on HD!
        
           | da39a3ee wrote:
           | Um, I think you need to rethink this comment bearing in mind
           | that a large proportion of people in the world don't have the
           | money for a monthly internet bill at all.
        
         | butterNaN wrote:
         | I would highly contest that. It's certainly not "The" reason,
         | unless this is an advertisement. Jio is not even the cheapest
         | option anymore in many places. I think your assessment is
         | outdated. Indian people are at par with their Inrernet usage as
         | the most of the world, it's just that there are a LOT of us in
         | the world. That's "the" reason - Population.
        
         | ioshaan wrote:
         | Of course. It's the same reason why Global Worldwide top posts
         | on Reddit overlap a lot with the Top posts for USA users.
        
           | kapitanjakc wrote:
           | Yeah
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | Jio only gained prominence in the early 2010s. While yes it did
         | definitely help in getting more Indians access to cheap data
         | plans, the country by and large has had a large English
         | speaking population connected to the internet - enough to
         | prominently show up on graphs - since well before that.
        
       | hliyan wrote:
       | I'm fairly certain that neither XXX movie franchise nor the XXXX
       | beer are as popular as these views would suggest.
        
         | lmpdev wrote:
         | Drinking a XXXX right now
         | 
         | It certainly doesn't _deserve_ all those views even if they
         | were real
        
       | cm2187 wrote:
       | The numbers look surprising to me if not dodgy.
       | 
       | Like why is "web hosting service" the number 1 result on 27th and
       | not even on the list the day before or after. It isn't really a
       | topical article.
       | 
       | Also even for the topical articles, the movies and TV shows at
       | the top aren't really major blockbusters. Or perhaps it is
       | because the population that watches superhero movies doesn't go
       | on wikipedia.
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | Quite a few of these looks weird, almost as if number of people
         | are typing something into a search engine. The weirdest one to
         | me are: YouTube, PornHub, XNXX and Facebook. It's almost like
         | people are just typing these into their browsers address bar,
         | but are for some reason redirected to Wikipedias search.
        
       | plufz wrote:
       | I don't mean to snark but a little depressive that it is all
       | brands, celebrities, marvel movies, etc, right? I hope there is a
       | long tail we don't see here where people look up more general
       | knowledge. Would be interesting to see top views per category.
        
         | magpi3 wrote:
         | Most popular = lowest common denominator, but that is not
         | really as bad as it sounds. It's perfectly possible that
         | everyone clicking on these general interest topics is also
         | reading about something more niche or educational at the same
         | time, but because we are all not reading about the same
         | educational thing those results don't show up.
        
         | p3rls wrote:
         | You can kinda see how the lightbulb appeared over Jimmy Wales
         | head with Fandom
        
         | arp242 wrote:
         | "Most viewed" is a very incomplete statistic. I often "view"
         | pages just to look up something like "is this film worth
         | watching?" or "what else has this person directed and is worth
         | watching?" - kind of like a reference similar to imdb, except
         | without imdb's clunky interface.
         | 
         | But this "view" isn't really a "read". There are other pages
         | I've also read much more in-depth, and in terms of "time spent"
         | it would probably rank much higher.
         | 
         | I'm sure some people do read these pages more in-depth too, but
         | there's no real way to tell who is using them merely as a
         | reference and who is actually reading them.
         | 
         | Back when phone books were common it was probably the most
         | "viewed" book.
        
       | mrweasel wrote:
       | It's interesting that others seems to go the same route as I do
       | for movies and TV shows and just use Wikipedia rather than IMDB.
       | IMDB has become so awful to use and shows no sign of improving.
       | Apparently IMDB don't believe that they have any competition and
       | over the years people have just started to add the same
       | information to Wikipedia.
        
         | r721 wrote:
         | If one has an IMDb account it's possible to get a "reference
         | view" by default which looks better in my opinion (old IMDb-
         | style): "Account Settings" - "Content Settings" - "Show
         | reference view".
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | IMDb is owned by Amazon. They use it for the Prime Video X-Ray
         | functionality. IMDbPro is probably useful for some members of
         | the industry (at $20 per month). Apart from that, the user
         | ratings and reviews are still kind of useful.
        
       | tacker2000 wrote:
       | What i found interesting: if you switch to "yearly", most of the
       | pages have almost 70-90% mobile visits, except the page on
       | "Bible", which has only 3% mobile.
       | 
       | Could that be due to bots/scrapers?
        
         | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
         | Probably hindus ate not that interested in the bible.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | Demographics, most likely.
        
       | atorodius wrote:
       | I clicked on the YouTube wikipedia article. TIL that that is the
       | 2nd most viewed website in the world! Crazy
        
       | bvaldivielso wrote:
       | One very curious thing I ran into today: this morning I woke up
       | and when I checked my phone, the (Spanish) Wikipedia page for
       | Cleopatra was open on my browser. I didn't myself open that
       | intentionally, but I thought I must have accidentally tapped on
       | some links while I was asleep, and ended up there.
       | 
       | But now I see this website and it turns out that "Cleopatra" is
       | consistently one of the most visited pages in the Spanish
       | Wikipedia. Odd! I googled and it turns out that it's because it's
       | one of the example queries in Google Assistant (source, in
       | Spanish:
       | https://www.elespanol.com/omicrono/software/20230118/cleopat...
       | ). I must have tapped on it without realising. And like me,
       | thousands of others, every day! Fascinating
        
         | verelo wrote:
         | Funny you mention that. I was also confused by this same
         | experience! I was recently introduced to the theory that most
         | of the internet is bot activity and very little legitimate user
         | activity. I think from a pure ratio perspective that's very
         | true, and this list made me ask "this is what people want to
         | know about?" I was hoping to see people researching higher
         | level queries, most of this seems like film and tv or fairly
         | basic concepts like "sex".
        
           | Retric wrote:
           | Depends on what you mean by activity.
           | 
           | Bots don't consume nearly as much bandwidth as people, they
           | generally don't care about assets like images or videos and
           | the don't download millions of copies of 100GB games. But
           | they can make a very high volume of requests.
        
           | NineStarPoint wrote:
           | Makes sense to me that only very popular and generic stuff
           | makes the top of the list. Even if Wikipedia was used more
           | for high level queries in aggregate, there's so many possible
           | things people could be looking into that it's necessarily
           | more spread out than whatever is popular this week.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | So, mostly celebrities, media, and typos, like the rest of the
       | internet. Fortunately, it's got a lot of other stuff too, and
       | unlike the rest of the internet, you can just enter Wikipedia at
       | the point of whatever you're looking up, without being bombarded
       | by _recommended content_. It 's completely self-serve. I'm glad
       | that Wikipedia is not yet incentivized to maximize daily active
       | users--or some other dumb metric--otherwise this would all
       | change.
        
         | phatskat wrote:
         | I don't think "gingering" is a typo given that figging is a few
         | ranks underneath
        
       | vmilner wrote:
       | I'm always curious as to whether taking the top 1% (say) of
       | articles in Wikipedia (ordered by view frequency over a year say)
       | and possibly adding the articles that link to those to some depth
       | (say 3 deep) would feel very different to the full version to
       | most users.
        
         | ClassyJacket wrote:
         | I would guess that 3 links deep to the top 1% would be nearly
         | the whole site
        
       | nedt wrote:
       | It's really surprising how much of the entries are coming from
       | linear TV. I think on the German stats it's around half the
       | entries. Rest of the top entries is news & sports, many of them
       | also pushed by linear TV. Maybe it's just the holiday season, but
       | still interesting to see.
        
       | squidbeak wrote:
       | #37 Figging
       | 
       | Blimey.
        
         | gerdesj wrote:
         | It's now 34 and now I know what it is I'm not looking up
         | gingering at 31!
        
       | mwexler wrote:
       | I find it interesting that the top results are recent topics. In
       | most cases, they appear to be folks getting context for news or
       | other timely events, or something else they saw or heard about in
       | the media.
       | 
       | Yes long tail yadda yadda, but it's an interesting reflection of
       | what we want to learn about or reference: actors, singers, recent
       | movies, and every once in a while, something else.
       | 
       | (Edit: fixed ambiguious wording)
        
       | delduca wrote:
       | On the yearly listing, Jeff Dahmer (serial killer) is the top
       | one.
        
       | nojvek wrote:
       | For views 2022: I had some idea about Jeffrey Dahmer but holy
       | mother of God, that article is chilling.
       | 
       | https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia...
       | 
       | Edit:
       | 
       | It seems top read articles fall into following major categories.
       | 
       | - Serial killers
       | 
       | - Con(wo)men
       | 
       | - Movies, Actors and Directors
       | 
       | - Sports, and famous athletes
       | 
       | - Big Tech apps/sites, and wealthy businessmen
       | 
       | - null (not sure why it's so high)
        
         | rafabulsing wrote:
         | Re: null, possibly a similar effect to the Null Island[0]? I.e.
         | bugs causing empty queries to search for null instead.
         | 
         | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island?wprov=sfla1
        
       | mike31fr wrote:
       | Here is something crazy:
       | 
       | In France the "Cookies" Wikipedia article is always ranked 1st
       | for most months of 2023, with a ridiculous amount times more
       | views (x10, x100,...) than the 2nd one. It doesn't really make
       | sense.
       | 
       | Example:
       | https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=fr.wikipedia...
        
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