User:Kpjas/text
Wikipedia is tremendously popular, web surfers flock in millions looking up thousands of articles every single second, the Alexa rank is steadily rising. Sometimes one might wonder what articles are actually the most popular ones and what is in the centre of our audience attention.
A few years ago for a very short time Wikipedia had a hit counter enabled but due to performance reasons it has been switched off since then. From time to time people appealed to developers to switch the counter on again but their pleas have been consistently turned down. For a few months there has been a possibility to have a glimpse at lists of the most popular pages in several Wikimedia projects. Leon Weber, a programmer from the German Wikipedia, has developed a statistical tool called Wikicharts.
To some extent it is a substitute of Wikimedia software hit counter. Although it is only an approximation of page hits not an real Wikimedia counter it is quite informative and useful. To some extent Wikicharts can be helpful in providing useful comparisons between various Wikipedias.
In this report I set out to compare Top 100 pages according to Wikicharts in several language versions of Wikipedia that have this mechanism installed, namely:
There are several tendencies in all Wikipedias that are universal: the Main Page is #1 in all but two Wikipedia, several auxiliary Special: pages land consistently in Top 20 in most languages (search, contributions etc).
Our readers quite obviously look up very frequently articles that correspond to the current news of global or local interest. One example of such event that stirred flux of visitors to our servers is the fatal accident of Steve Irwin who was pierced in the chest by a stingray.
Expectedly the anniversary of September 11, 2001 attacks was featured among the most viewed articles in the largest language Wikipedias. Articles about the country or countries and the capital are at the top of the list for example France (#4) and Paris (#15).
There are also some remarkable differences between various Wikipedia language versions. There is interesting to note that in the French and German Wikipedias a lot of portal pages rank high in the popularity statistics. Apparently these Wikipedias have produced good and readable content in the portals that draws a crowd of readers.
Sexuality is known to be a top search in all web search engines. Not surprisingly the same is true in Wikipedias but English-speaking readers are even more than of speakers of other languages are hungry for information in this area. Although hit counter is not an essential tool for Wikipedia authors, sometimes it's worth have a look at the Wikicharts. Most viewed articles tend to be the most vandalised ones and beacuse of that need special attention. Some articles that are of topical interest might not be yet up the level a Wikipedia would want it to be.