[WikiEN-l] Meaningful estimates of popularity?

[David Gerard]

The Wikicharts are back in the news, with BoingBoing reporting on
Conservapedia's most popular pages:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/21/top-ten-most-viewed.html

The Wikicharts are a sampled raw page count:

http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/%7Eleon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=alle&limit=100&month=11%2F2007&mode=view
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCharts

The hits on "Main Page" will be people just going to the site. The
hits on "wiki" will not be because of a society-wide fascination with
editable websites, but (I would guess) because people have typed
"wiki" into a search engine. I suspect a lot of the sex-related hits
will be disappointed porn seekers.

The question is: what does "popular" actually usefully mean? Raw page
hits demonstrably isn't quite it. "Pages with most hits gone to by
people looking for information" (whether starting from Wikipedia, a
search engine or a link) is closer to what we're after (even if it's
hard to quantify intent). Ideas?

(Thankfully it's a little harder to rig the charts on Wikipedia than
on Conservapedia.)


- d.