[Reposting without thread history, to get past mailing list filter]

From: Erik Zachte [mailto:ezachte@wikimedia.org]
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 5:04 PM
To: 'A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics.'
Cc: 'Jake Orlowitz'; 'Anthony Cole'; 'James Heilman'; 'Wiki Medicine discussion'; 'Matthew Roth'
Subject: RE: [Analytics] need traffic data for health content...

Hi Lane,

Did you see these reports?

Here is a category tree below category 'Health' on English Wikipedia (with some out-of-context sub branches blacklisted).

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2013-07/categories_wp-en_cat_Health_2013-07.html

Here are the page views for articles in all those categories:

Warning the list is overly complete by design:

Some top ranking titles in this list may seem out of place.

Please note that any Wikipedia article can have tens of categories assigned to it.

A popular article will rank high in any list where it's featured, regardless of the category under review.

Thus a well-known singer may be top ranking in a list about politicians, because he/she also played a minor or brief role in politics.

Iterative pruning of the category tree will yield better results. Now you have to do final filtering yourself.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pageviews/categorized/wp-en/2013-07/pageviews_wp-en_cat_Health_2013-07.html

New insight:

Instead of using the category hierarchy, article lists from WikiProjects would yield cleaner results, and would suffice for many purposes, notably yours :-)

Cheers,

Erik