Wikipedia page view analysis 2012

February 6, 2013 12:11 AM

"The best way to reach the highest levels of Wikipedia popularity are to be a celebrity who (a) dies, or (b) plays the Super Bowl halftime show". Examining the popularity of Wikipedia articles: catalysts, trends, and applications. See also the annotated Top 25 Report. Previously: Wikipedia in 2012.
posted by stbalbach (11 comments total)

People like boats, The Rock, Indian movies, Downton Abbey, and How I Met Your Mother.

Now I know how to relate to people!
posted by Redfield at 12:25 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

So, a celebrity who dies while playing the Super Bowl halftime show will break Wikipedia.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:36 AM on February 6 [4 favorites]

When I saw "G-Force" in the top 25 report I thought the movie with the talking hamsters had somehow gained a cult following.
posted by Potsy at 2:05 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

So, a celebrity who dies while playing the Super Bowl halftime show

Announcer: "Celebrity catastrophe experts around the world are now calling it the worst wardrobe malfunction in history. During the halftime show at Super Bowl XLVIII today, all electricity went out just as the world-renowned Cincinnati Synchronized Iron Lung Squad began their famous rapid roll to the front of the stage."
posted by pracowity at 2:23 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Wow, this is really interesting. It's not just the top25, but if you click the links you can get to the top 5,000 at the moment and that is in turn based on the raw pagecounts dump which actually gives you hour by hour statistics on hits going all the way back to 2007.

Seems like you could do some really interesting stuff with that data. One thing that sucks about more and more web content moving to 'closed' systems like twitter and facebook is that they're keeping all the data for themselves, since so they can be the ones who monetize it. There was an interesting article about how twitter bought a company that does data analysis for broadcast media. The author speculated that their idea might be to provide real time impact measurement on ads.

I'm sure they'll make decent money doing so, but it still kind of sucks that their wanting to be able to offer exclusive analysis of their data means lots of interesting stuff can't be done unless you pay them a ton of money.

So yeah the fact this data is out there is definitely pretty cool. And in a way it's much more specific to see actual wikipedia URLs as opposed to trying to parse and guess what someone might have been talking about in a tweet.
posted by delmoi at 5:20 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

When I saw "G-Force" in the top 25 report I thought the movie with the talking hamsters had somehow gained a cult following.

It could be. Looking at google trends the number two related term is "g-force movie" (and after that, searches relating to NVidia "G-force" (as opposed to GeForce))

But, there's no spike in interest on Google in June of 2012.

Mysterious.
posted by delmoi at 5:24 AM on February 6

flapjax at midnite: "So, a celebrity who dies while playing the Super Bowl halftime show will break Wikipedia."

Probably only exceeded by someone pulling a Last Boy Scout move.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:14 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

G-Force - Mark, Jason, Keyup..no, wait, there's another G-force?
posted by marienbad at 6:42 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Walter Cronkite predicted in a video made in 1965 that the home of the 21st century would have a terminal where you could call up information about cat anatomy with just the press of a lever. He wasn't that far off!
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 6:43 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

The article "Examining the popularity of Wikipedia articles" is quite good and worth taking the time to read in detail. For example we learn:

* "The top 25 most viewed pages represent 4.02% of all total views, and the top 5000 represent 19.1% of all views."

* "Google, YouTube, and Facebook are all consistently popular articles. We speculate this is due in part to people accidentally typing these site names/URLs into a Wikipedia search box when intending to actually visit the sites themselves"

* "Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website on the Internet"

Taken these three things together, it appears some non-significant portion of all Internet traffic may be people typing "Google" into the wrong search box.
posted by stbalbach at 7:19 AM on February 6

stbalbach: Taken these three things together, it appears some non-significant portion of all Internet traffic may be people typing "Google" into the wrong search box.

This is really easy to do if you use Firefox and have Wikipedia as an option for your search menu - you just have to search Wikipedia and then forget to switch it back to Google. I'm sure I've sent Wikipedia and Entrez some very strange searches over the years.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:07 AM on February 6