Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-04/Special report

This page has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: Wesley Fenlon (2013-02-06). "Wikipedia Signpost Report Peers Into the Pop Culture Trends that Drive Big Traffic". Tested.com. Rebecca J. Rosen (2013-02-06). "If You Want Your Wikipedia Page to Get a TON of Traffic, Die While Performing at the Super Bowl Half-Time Show". The Atlantic. Jamie Condliff (2013-02-11). "The Biggest Wikipedia Traffic Spikes Since 2010 Prove We're All Morbid". Gizmodo. Amar Toor (2013-02-11). "What Wikipedia's most popular pages say about us". TheVerge.com.

This is a fantastic article; thank you for sharing. Jujutacular (talk) 02:37, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, fascinating stuff.--ukexpat (talk) 03:22, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, very interesting and comprehensive. Great job! --Waldir ^talk 03:59, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is excellent, thanks so much for doing this and writing the article about it. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 04:17, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, completely agreed with all the previous comments. (And, for those interested in the topic of high-profile events leading to massive page view spikes pre-2010, there's some coverage here, here, here, and here.) --MZMcBride (talk) 06:19, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Some more notes on 2008 election traffic. I didn't get hourly figures for Obama, but I suspect in the low hundreds of thousands per hour - so just off our list above. Andrew Gray (talk) 07:31, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I expect the most viewed article ever will come from a celebrity who dies while playing the Super Bowl half time show ... but seriously, very interesting article. Great work. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 11:55, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A significant reason we write the encyclopedia is for people to read it. Wikipedia:Did you know/Statistics provides some sense of what readers look for on the Main Page. However, the analysis provide above by West.andrew.g and Milowent is exactly what we need to get a better sense of what our readers desire on a larger scale as well as a sense of how the encyclopedia articles are being used. Great job! - Uzma Gamal (talk) 13:02, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not only is this a great article, it supplies important information -- not just for Wikipedia, but for the marketing world in general. Since most people don't know about the Signpost, I highly recommend posting about this article on marketing and social media sites - tweet it up. -- kosboot (talk) 14:26, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Like others above, I welcome the coverage of viewing statistics, which is an area greatly neglected in most wiki-discourse. But I am always less interested in the very top of the charts than the middle and bottom, and more on this in the future would be really great. A few weeks ago I posed a question on the technical pumps, asking how we can generalize about the number or proportion of crawler bot hits in the article stats which, unlike everything else on the page, received no response at all. Yet this is a key question for much current editing, which overwhelmingly concentrates on long tail article with low viewing figures. Also, what are we able to say about how long average "readers" spend on an article, and how much they actually read? I haven't a clue, beyond the overall average figure of a few seconds (which I can't seem to find now). Johnbod (talk) 16:24, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Very good work! A pity that this came out now and that it started in 2010; if it had started in 2009, it would have been able to account for stories about the death of Michael Jackson, and if it had only come a few days later, it would have been able to include the massive spike for hits on Richard III of England, which typically got a few thousand hits daily until Monday, when it got about 800,000, or almost 25× the number of hits for that day's featured article. I'll look forward to future studies! Nyttend (talk) 02:42, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Richard III will certainly be far up the next WP:TOP25, look for it on Monday.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 03:17, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Because I read the story too fast, your comment was my first clue to this page, and I'd never seen WP:5000 before, either. Quite intriguing! Nyttend (talk) 04:33, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Richard came in at #2, see WP:TOP25, beat by a Google Doogle of Mary Leakey.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 05:28, 11 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Really great article about the power of WP. The effect that WP has had on our world is huge, but unfortunately largely unmeasurable on the individuals' side of things. I thought that the readers here, may likewise enjoy a piece of research that I recently read (that cites WP as an example), that I feel is very fascinating in how it describes the power behind phenomena like WP. It's called "The Theory of Crowd Capital" and you can download it here if you're interested: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193115 Enjoy! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.85.85.220 (talk) 01:24, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Excellent work on this piece. We need more stuff like this in the Signpost. Carrite (talk) 04:14, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Nobody forget we've already had an article like this two years ago, but that was a bit less detailed in the analysis. Rcsprinter (chat) @ 23:03, 9 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work. I'm reminded of this page: Wikipedia:Short popular vital articles.

• Would be great if research can lead to suggestions for software features. A sparkline on the margin perhaps and perhaps indicators of articles in one's watchlist that are showing a viewership peaking. Shyamal (talk) 05:44, 11 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• FYI, this article is the basis for a Wikimania 2013 submission of the same title. Thanks (as proposer), West.andrew.g (talk) 21:43, 27 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]