On 5/1/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Perhaps there's a relation in there to the facts that Heroes airs on Mondays in most of the world and Spider-Man 3's international release date was May 1. Current events and pop-culture, all mixed together. And everyone knows that Pokemon is obviously the single, undisputed, most important part of Wikipedia, right? -- Jonel

-I don't find searches for 'Wiki' odd at all. Most of the people searching are probably interested in the entymology. It's not like we called it 'Quickipedia' or 'Upedia'. -My guess is that no-one's interested in reading about the Iraq War because we don't see any possibility of enlightenment from the article. The other articles cover parts of history most living people don't know much about. I, personally, know almost nothing about WW1 past the broadest of strokes, so I may just sit down and read the WW1 articles sometime. -Alternative hypothesis: Many, many people use Wiki for homework help and not many schools have added Iraq to their curriculums. -I have no idea why Naruto is so popular on Wikipedia, or really, anywhere. I will point out that it's the #4 search term on Lycos, below only Poker, Paris Hilton, and Myspace, so it's not an exclusively Wiki phenom. http://www.animationinsider.net/article.php?articleID=856 The preceding article says that Naruto is a relatively new Japanese import that is very popular among kids. Looking through the edit history, the main Naruto received a few edits a month from May 2003 to mid-March 2005. Something happened and Naruto started receiving about 1-2 edits a day. As the above-article aludes to, it began to show here in the United States in late 2005, which is when the Wiki article's popularity exploded and it began to be edited multiple times per day. Looking at it today, it would seem its popularity is waning. My guess is that 90% of the Naruto articles will be purged with such highly informative deletion rationales as 'nn fancruft' some time in 2008-2009. Related: In my Naruto-related searching, I stumbled across this article. "What is popular on Wikipedia and why?" http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/spoerri2/

On 02/05/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: The extent to which these charts reflect anything that could meaningfully be called "popularity" is questionable. Remember that this chart is a ranking of raw page hits data. I strongly suspect a lot of the porn stuff was from search engine hits, for example, and would have disappointed the eventual reader. I'm not sure how we'd measure people looking up stuff on Wikipedia specifically. That would reflect popularity of an article within Wikipedia. That said, hell yeah - make [[Wiki]] a feature! - d.