Are people really reading Youtube, pornhub, facebook, Instagram pages this frequently or are these misclicks from search result page?

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.

I could see iOS safari doing this. It often has a suggested page when you type in the search/URL bar.

Yes and also there are many that never use the address bar, just google names. With this mindset, any text input with a lens icon is a way to reach pages... or sites... apps, stuff, whatever.

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.

> 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.

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)

You can find most scientific papers on Sci-hub.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's worse than that. It affects the entire site. Here's an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(automobile_manufact...

> "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.

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.

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...

> 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.

> it's that that is already implied by the rest of the sentence

But is it? Here in the UK, we have the National Health Service with completely free treatment except for some combinations of basic services and higher personal income levels. Yet, most employers for higher-up jobs provide part or even full private healthcare. A quick search on a jobs board shows some examples:

Train driver at Great Western Railways:

  ...all GWR colleagues enjoy a range of benefits including... [a] company-sponsored health care plan...

Software developer at Motorola*:

  ...Also, to reward your hard work you’ll get... Private medical care...

Senior accountant at a firm in Teddington, salary £50k-£65k:

  ...Benefits... Private medical insurance...

Are these employers offering this because the NHS isn't good enough at keeping their employees healthy? Because they want to make a political point against state-funded welfare? Because it's a status symbol? I don't know, but again, they are offering (a supposedly better version of) a vital service that people already have provided by the country. So to continue the earlier analogy of Brazil, if my ignorant self read that a Brazilian company provided private health insurance, I wouldn't be able to tell whether this was a 'nice extra to have' on top of state support like it is here, or an absolutely vital service like in the USA.

> This is proving my case. You don't need sock puppets if your modus operandi is to make neutral edits.

I agree with you here. If it wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to defend user 'GoldDragon' or those like them. It's a biased statement by its wording, but the facts are all there and accurate. I think I like that aspect of Wikipedia - yes, there is editorial bias, but it can only exist around the fringes of the facts; conjecture is strictly banned. In my experience, plenty of newspapers indulge in conjecture as well as editorial bias; being primary sources doesn't fully redeem them for this.

* this one is unintentionally hilarious, as they also promise company-funded 'life assurance'. If only :)

> So to continue the earlier analogy of Brazil, if my ignorant self read that a Brazilian company provided private health insurance, I wouldn't be able to tell whether this was a 'nice extra to have' on top of state support like it is here, or an absolutely vital service like in the USA.

Only you can:

> "GM, for instance, at one time picked up the entire cost of funding health insurance premiums of its employees, their survivors and GM retirees"

Implies the employees et al are paying part or all of the premiums themselves in the alternative.

> "private health insurance"

Implies they get public health insurance in the alternative.

> It's a biased statement by its wording, but the facts are all there and accurate. I think I like that aspect of Wikipedia - yes, there is editorial bias, but it can only exist around the fringes of the facts; conjecture is strictly banned.

Selection bias is all you need to control the world though.

> In my experience, plenty of newspapers indulge in conjecture as well as editorial bias; being primary sources doesn't fully redeem them for this.

Newspapers are notoriously biased. See Yellow Journalism etc. It's the same practice and the same problem -- a lie of omission is a type of lie, not a type of honesty. They'd like to lie, but don't want to get caught in a lie or sued for libel, so they lead you down the garden path.

"Technically Correct: The Best Kind of Correct." Because that's how you get away with something. But getting away with something isn't neutrality, it's the system having a bias in your favor.

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.

> 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.

Moreover, Wikipedia relies heavily on news articles as sources. It goes without saying that news outlets are not well known for holding neutral positions.

> 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.

Is it even "the less bad one"? I guess it's not if you're on the wrong side of censorship.

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.

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.

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!'

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?

Among Britannica's authors are Einstein, Trotsky, Asimov, Milton Friedman, and many such others. [1] In Wikipedia, Trotsky himself could not opine on e.g. communism. By contrast, the words of a random junior journalist in an opinion piece published on a newspaper website are perfectly legitimate for publication in an article on communism. Wikipedia is simply a very different sort of project than an encyclopedia.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#P...

Perhaps you misunderstand what “encyclopedia” means? Britannica itself classify Wikipedia as an encyclopedia (https://www.britannica.com/topic/encyclopaedia/The-kinds-of-...)

Now you're shifting the goal posts to semantics. You implied Wikipedia and encyclopedias used the same methods, which is incorrect. Britannica is written by field domain experts, many of them world leading. Wikipedia is instead, as you described, a collection of citations of other work, written by random people, and which relies heavily on the US media as a source for any sort of cultural, social, or political topic.

There was a pretty interesting paper written looking at the biases in Wiki vs Britannica. [1] You might find it interesting.

[1] - https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-experts-or-collective-intellig...

> You implied Wikipedia and encyclopedias used the same methods, which is incorrect.

I just pointed out that Britannica (like Wikipedia) is not a primary source. “Primary source” have a specific meaning and encyclopedias are not primary sources - regardless of the editorial process and the credentials of the authors.

Try citing Britannica in an academic paper and se how well it goes.

It'd go just fine. Here's a quick Google Scholar search for the header of the MLA citation standard for unattributed Britannica articles. [1] There are thousands. Encyclopedias are fine sources, but Wikipedia is not. Encyclopedias biggest shortcoming would be that for specialized topics one would of course be far better served by books, papers, and the likes.

[1] - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?lookup=0&q=%22Britannica,...

Yeah, try choosing Platform: Mobile app

https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia...

Bingo

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.

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.

“Pornhub” alone gets 441 million searches monthly. A lot of people probably decide to randomly read the Wikipedia page.

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.

Stuff like this makes me realize how different people use the internet than I do

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

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...

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.

I live in the Netherlands, probably not talked about over here. But second, I try to avoid the news. Glad I missed this one :)

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.

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.

Men get tasked with violence at the behest of women far too often, imo.

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)

> unnecessary surgeries

I hope the doctors involved got a decent reprimand for that too...

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.

The Wikipedia page also mentions that “Tubes were implanted in her ears to control her myriad purported ear infections”.

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).

It turns out you can't just go and unilaterally decide to kill people.

There is a good reason people want government institutions to jealously guard this right.

The government is very fickle with giving out the death penalty.

Obviously prison time was warranted, I just think life without parole was excessive. 20 years would have been adaquate justice in this case.

But her boyfriend got life in prison.

Killer got out of jail.

Maybe you should read the related Wikipedia article.

Quite a read though...

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.

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.

That page reads like a blog or a murder novel, not a wikipedia article

That happens to basically everything the true crime followers get their hands on. They are all about narrative.

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

That's a dead end link. Try to create an archive.org link.

After thinking about it, those results are probably so high up because people are misspelling "fingering."

gingering is a word somewhere I know

Fixed link: https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/18tpie2/til_...

Shout out to the Behind the Bastards episode - The Ballad of Eel Horse

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1LT2cR70h366WwTzVZs2VB

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=Noël,Wei... الميلاد,圣诞节&hl=en

Off-topic fact about your first ([1]) plot: more Russians celebrate Christmas on January 7th (Orthodox Church) than on December 25th.

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?

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.

You mean median, and that is probably a fact.

Since Wikipedia is likely banned in China, we don’t get those stats reflected.

Both are ~1.5B population countries

Or do they mean mode?

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

Good point. I just checked the Hindi page (https://pageviews.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.)

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.

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.

Yeah, but that also requires your local edition of Wikipedia to be good and useful, which is not always the case.

I noticed "Reacher (TV Series)" showed up. I guess we finally have a way to figure out what people are watching....

Most likely because 2nd season just dropped recently.

TPB et al. will tell you that, too.

A few more filters would be great. Being able to exclude movies/tv/etc would take this from interesting to useful (IMHO).

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?

Maybe they go accidentally on that page after searching for youtube on google/in their address bar?

Does the Google info sidebar ping Wikipedia every time "YouTube" is queried? Would that show up in these statistics?

Google is certainly caching those results on their own servers.

yep ... this is most likely the reason ... happened to me a lot of times

Would have never guessed mobile percentage is this high.

Most economies predominantly use mobile devices. We're atypical. Actually, almost all my non work usage is tablet so maybe I am typical.

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.

A lot of these pages look movie related, so it’s likely people looking stuff up on their phones after watching something.

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).

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.

Surely 3% of total traffic for something like Wikipedia (hyperpopular) is well worth the investment?

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.

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.

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?

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).

By the way, everywhere I've worked the traffic to mobile native has been around 3% I think. Engagement is much higher than with other channels mind you, so maybe that's it.

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

Maybe some big website refers to that page in their cookie banner?

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...

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.

Why does a rapper who's been dead for years occupy the eighth position?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXTentacion

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.

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.

As long as he's on the list, he's not dead.

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.

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.

Why is "Skathi (moon)" 12-th most popular in 2022?

Related /r/wikipedia/ discussion:

https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/167xb3t/does_any...

Who looks at the pornhub page at wikipedia?

People who type "pornhub" into Google and then misclick because they're unzipping at the same time

a lot of mothers maybe

Huh, didn't know they finally migrated all the tools to a centralized place, wmcloud.org.

Nothing like Jeffrey Dahmer being #1 for the year and Andrew Tate rounding out the top 25 to restore your faith in humanity. /s

It is not that bad (hint: check Logarithmic scale)

https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedi...

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.

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

Yup, very much agreed, as I said Jio was the catalyst.

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.

I wonder what the results would look like without the Great Firewall of China.

Not much different if you are still counting the English Wikipedia.

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_English-s...

'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.

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!

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.

Of course. It's the same reason why Global Worldwide top posts on Reddit overlap a lot with the Top posts for USA users.

Yeah

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.

I'm fairly certain that neither XXX movie franchise nor the XXXX beer are as popular as these views would suggest.

Drinking a XXXX right now

It certainly doesn’t deserve all those views even if they were real

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.

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.

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.

You can kinda see how the lightbulb appeared over Jimmy Wales head with Fandom

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.

"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.

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.

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".

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.

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?

Probably hindus ate not that interested in the bible.

Demographics, most likely.

I clicked on the YouTube wikipedia article. TIL that that is the 2nd most viewed website in the world! Crazy

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

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”.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think “gingering” is a typo given that figging is a few ranks underneath

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.

I would guess that 3 links deep to the top 1% would be nearly the whole site

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.

#37 Figging

Blimey.

It's now 34 and now I know what it is I'm not looking up gingering at 31!

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)

On the yearly listing, Jeff Dahmer (serial killer) is the top one.

For views all time. 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)

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

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...

Some cookie banners, when you reject everything they're asking to put on your computer, are redirecting you on this page.

I'm using an extension to hide them automatically so I can't give you a proper example but I've experienced it in the past.

The ones from Webedia maybe? I know they have the worst interpretation of the GDPR.

What’s up with Index in January 2023?