Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-29/Traffic report

Most popular Wikipedia articles of the last week

After the special report on article popularity published in February, the WP:TOP25 and WP:5000 reports have continued to chronicle the most popular Wikipedia articles on a weekly basis. For the most recently reviewed week (22–28 April), we see that it was generally a slow week, dominated by pop culture, previous entries to the list, as well as Google Doodles and Reddit threads.

For the week of 22 to 28 April, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Ella Fitzgerald	1,902,708	The First Lady of Song, the Queen of Jazz; she of the 3-octave range and 13 Grammy wins received a Google Doodle in honour of what would have been her 96th birthday on April 25.
2	Iron Man 3	652,309	As per usual in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the third installment in the Iron Man series was released internationally a week early, triggering interest before its release in its home country on May 3.
3	Game of Thrones	543,047	This epic fantasy TV series launched its third season on March 31, and has seen its ratings almost double on its premiere episode.
4	Munich massacre	503,257	An attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany on the Israeli Olympic team by the Palestinian group Black September. Most views came on April 25, cause is not certain.
5	Facebook	488,397	A perennially popular article, it always appears in the WP:TOP25
6	Hemlock Grove (TV series)	474,142	Produced by schlockmeister Eli Roth, who also directed the pilot, this predictably gory werewolf series, based on a novel, was released in its entirety via Netflix on April 19.
7	Oblivion (2013 film)	466,461	Despite narrowly losing the weekend top spot to Michael Bay's sociopathon Pain & Gain, this Tom Cruise star vehicle still handily beat it in the Wikipedia stakes, garnering more than twice its views.
8	Deaths in 2013	426,855	The list of deaths in the current year is always a quite popular article.
9	Socotra	407,165	This biodiversity hotspot in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Yemen received a massive amount of attention thanks to a TIL (Today I Learned) thread on Reddit.
10	George Jones	404,786	Country music singer and onetime Mr. Tammy Wynette who died on April 26

Notes:

• This list is derived from the WP:5000 report. It excludes the Wikipedia main page (and "wiki"), non-article pages, and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views).
• Standard removals this week include G-force (continuing popularity of this article, which jumped in June 2012, has been without explanation) and Cat anatomy (explanation still unknown for its continuing high view counts)
• Specific removals this week (those articles for which no reason for any sudden popularity could be located):

• Daniel Luke Barth (likely automated views of a vanity BLP, as judged by subjects excitement about his accomplishment on Twitter.[1])
• Centrality
• Hoisin sauce
• Harlan County, Kentucky

In this issue

29 April 2013 (all comments)

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• I wonder if perhaps the Munich Massacre thing could be related to the events in this article? Perhaps during the event someone called it Munich Massacre and a bunch of people Googled the term. I could be completely off though. Zell Faze (talk) 13:00, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting thought! Since we started the WP:TOP25 in January we've learned that article popularity can come from many places on the internet--and it can be difficult to figure it out. One thing that suggests it wasn't the football game is the lack of any spike in tweets for the term. Tw1itter doesn't always provide evidence of spikes driven by other sources, but it often does. Another suggestion is that it was tied somehow to the Boston Bombings, but they occurred 10 days prior to the spike. There was a very small spike after the Boston event (hitting 9200 views on April 16), but the jump to 488,000 views on April 25 is odd. If anyone solves this mystery, I promise we'll mention you in the next WP:TOP25 report.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 14:36, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Have you considered developing a tool to correlate pageviews with other data(i.e. Google Trends)? Even better, it could be built to expose an input api so anyone would be able to develop a script to parse any arbitrary dataset (i.e. Google Correlate, Wolfram Curated Data, Twitter trends, weather patterns, etc). It has some cool potential!--Test35965 (talk) 06:39, 9 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• I'm glad to see this added to the Signpost. I hope it becomes a weekly feature. I'd like it even better if the full 25 were listed, but it's easy to click over to it from here. Thanks for doing the work to make this happen. SchreiberBike (talk) 15:42, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I would love to see this be a weekly feature as well. Zell Faze (talk) 20:25, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Me too. This is fun. -- Taku (talk) 04:51, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• It's interesting to see that tons of views by Redditors for the #9, Socotra, might not have translated into any edits at all (there were only a dozen in April). —innotata 17:26, 2 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• This is a nice feature, thanks for the work and I hope it becomes a regular feature. But, not to quibble, but isn't "schlockmeister" a tad pejorative? Herostratus (talk) 02:56, 3 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It probably is a tad, though I checked and other sources have actually used the same term!--Milowent • ^hasspoken 16:08, 6 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]