Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-06-12/Traffic report

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Traffic report

Who holds the throne?

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By Serendipodous

Last week's most popular article list was dominated by the massively popular TV series Game of Thrones, which claimed six slots in the top 25, including the top three. Its popularity was likely stoked by the most recent episode, The Rains of Castamere. Bollywood continued to increase its share of views as well, aided by the tragic suicide of star Jiah Khan.

For the week of 2 to 8 June, 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 Game of Thrones 1,314,024 Viewing figures for the third season of this epic fantasy TV series are up by a million, and reaction to this week's episode augurs high ratings for next week's finale.
2 Game of Thrones (season 3) 827,717 see #1 above
3 List of Game of Thrones episodes 827,553 see #1 and 2 above
4 Jiah Khan 652,165
The tragic apparent suicide of this young Bollywood actress made headlines across India.
5 A Song of Ice and Fire 631,362 The series of novels by George R. R. Martin on which the TV series Game of Thrones (above) is based.
6 Facebook 585,492 A perennially popular article.
7 Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani 539,078 This romantic comedy is currently the 7th highest-grossing Bollywood film in history.
8 Juliane Köpcke 527,384 The young woman who fell more than 10,000 feet from a disintegrating plane and survived, only to have to walk several miles though jungle, became a talking point as a result of a Today I Learned thread on Reddit.
9 After Earth 471,632 Despite appearing on course to box-office bombhood, having grossed only $50 million worldwide in ten days against a $130 million budget, this remains the most-viewed American movie on Wikipedia.
10 The Purge 450,459 This social allegory/home invasion thriller had a strikingly good opening weekend, taking in ~$36 million on a $3 million budget, despite poor reviews.

For the complete top 25, please see: Wikipedia:Top25Report

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). Please feel free to discuss any removal on the talk page if you wish. Standard removals this week include:
    • Cat anatomy: explanation still unknown for its continuing high view counts
    • G: This, or alternately G-force, has been in the Top 25 since the list was started at the beginning of the year. The continuing popularity of this article, which jumped in June 2012, has been without explanation.
    • Ernst Litfaß: The inventor of advertising columns has seen periodic spikes in views since this project began. Since the German Wikipedia shows no such spikes, the reason for them is a mystery.
  • Specific removals this week (those articles for which no reason for any sudden popularity could be located):
    • Jim Lovell: This astronaut, made famous by Tom Hanks in the film Apollo 13, got a massive spike in views on June 2 and 3, for reasons unknown.
    • Rosetta Stone: This article saw an anomalous 1-day spike on June 7. Since this was the day after Rosetta Stone Inc. announced the pricing of its stocks, it was likely due to an adware bot.
    • Second Congo War: Why this war, which has been largely ignored outside Africa, should get a spike in views this week has not been determined as yet.
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  • Missed the extraordinary spikes in three or more clusters of articles related to the PRISM scandal. :-) Tony (talk) 07:45, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I thought that PRISM would end up in the top 25, but apparently it didn't. It might be a good idea in future to examine why articles don't get high view counts. This has proven relevant to the list in the past. Serendipodous 08:03, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Or ... just a thought ... you might consider listing the best ones, but if there's notable international news causing traffic spikes, and they seem interesting enough to readers, it could be worth a mention at the bottom. For example, The Guardian and the South China Post both got spikes from the day of their big stories ... several days apart. Cheers and thanks. Tony (talk) 08:07, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This report covers 2 to 8 June, so it may just be that the view counts hadn't kicked in by the cutoff date. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 08:29, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have a simple possible explanation for "G" and "G-force" appearing high in traffic counts. Users who use google chrome or another "unified search bar" browser may be typing in "g" in the browser in an effort to get to google and instead performing a google search for "g" during which those two pages will be high in the search results, then they are only one misclick or curious glance away from the articles in question? Once they do this once, the algorithms that govern these search bars will place the page more highly and make it easy to repeatedly land on that page when trying to get to the google homepage. Hard to test but that is my best guess? AlasdairEdits (talk) 10:41, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting and very plausible. But as you say, hard to test. It might however be a convincing enough argument to remove the article mentions from the page altogether, assuming enough people agree. Serendipodous 11:20, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That thread was posted today; the list covered last week. Serendipodous 12:28, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]


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