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

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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. Serendi ^pod ous 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. Serendi ^pod ous 11:20, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There was a post on Reddit [1] about a UN intervention in a DRC civil war, which may have caused Google searches that led to the (temporally unrelated) Second Congo War article ---- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 12:21, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That thread was posted today; the list covered last week. Serendi ^pod ous 12:28, 14 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]