Wikicharts is still up and running: Observations from April: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=...
* Current events really do dominate. Three of the top ten are related to the Virginia Tech massacre. * "Wiki" is a perennial favourite, which I find a bit bizarre. * It's very odd that World War II, World War I, Vietnam War and even Cold War are in the top 100, but Iraq War isn't. I wouldn't have expected the high placement of WWII and Adolf Hitler. * Apparently viewers' obsession with sex is diminishing. Only two sex-related articles in the top 20.
I also note from the 1 day of May stats ( http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=... ): * The daily FA ranks #12 * The date itself does well (May 1 #14, May Day #2) * Popular culture does very well: Heroes #4, List of characters in Heroes #6, Spider-man 3 #7, List of Pokemon #10...
Should we be reacting to these statistics in some way? Given the enormous interest in our [[Wiki]] article, should we put more effort into making it an FA?
Steve
On 5/1/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
- Popular culture does very well: Heroes #4, List of characters in
Heroes #6, Spider-man 3 #7, List of Pokemon #10...
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
On 5/2/07, Nick Wilkins nlwilkins@gmail.com wrote:
And everyone knows that Pokemon is obviously the single, undisputed, most important part of Wikipedia, right?
Apparently it's not. Close, but not the most important.
Steve
On 5/2/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/2/07, Nick Wilkins nlwilkins@gmail.com wrote:
And everyone knows that Pokemon is obviously the single, undisputed, most important part of Wikipedia, right?
Apparently it's not. Close, but not the most important.
Pokemon is so yesterday. Naruto now dominates the list with six, sometimes seven entries in the top 100:
8. Naruto 30. Akatsuki (Naruto) 34. List of characters in Naruto 36. List of Naruto episodes 70. List of ninjutsu in Naruto (S-Z) 85. List of ninjutsu in Naruto (H-R)
On the WikipediaWeekly podcast we do an occasional rundown of the top 100, and we've been trying to figure out why it's so popular. Any clues from this list are welcome.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
I don't know about you guys, but I'm afraid of what the reason might be.
-David
On 5/2/07, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/2/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/2/07, Nick Wilkins nlwilkins@gmail.com wrote:
And everyone knows that Pokemon is obviously the single, undisputed,
most
important part of Wikipedia, right?
Apparently it's not. Close, but not the most important.
Pokemon is so yesterday. Naruto now dominates the list with six, sometimes seven entries in the top 100:
- Naruto
- Akatsuki (Naruto)
- List of characters in Naruto
- List of Naruto episodes
- List of ninjutsu in Naruto (S-Z)
- List of ninjutsu in Naruto (H-R)
On the WikipediaWeekly podcast we do an occasional rundown of the top 100, and we've been trying to figure out why it's so popular. Any clues from this list are welcome.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
-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 5/2/07, C.J. Croy cjcroy@gmail.com wrote:
-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'.
But that implies we are getting huge numbers of people who arrive at Wikipedia and have no idea what it is. I don't see that you would read up on [[Wiki]] then next week come back and read up on it again. I wonder what link it is that sends them there? If it was a link on [[Wikipedia]], then [[Wikipedia]] would logically have at least as many page views as [[Wiki]] does.
-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
?
-Alternative hypothesis: Many, many people use Wiki for homework help and not many schools have added Iraq to their curriculums.
I like that hypothesis better.
-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.
That's a nice cross-check.
http://www.animationinsider.net/article.php?articleID=856 The preceding article says that Naruto is a relatively new Japanese import
I'd never heard of it until today. Probably a good sign.
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/
I'm not sure their conclusions are particularly enlightening. But oh well.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/2/07, C.J. Croy cjcroy@gmail.com wrote:
-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'.
But that implies we are getting huge numbers of people who arrive at Wikipedia and have no idea what it is. I don't see that you would read up on [[Wiki]] then next week come back and read up on it again. I wonder what link it is that sends them there? If it was a link on [[Wikipedia]], then [[Wikipedia]] would logically have at least as many page views as [[Wiki]] does.
Google for "Wiki". The top item is the Wikipedia page [[Wiki]].
Many people don't use bookmarks/favorites. They use Google (or another search engine). And why type "Wikipedia" when "wiki" works just as well?
-Rich
"C.J. Croy" cjcroy@gmail.com writes: ...
-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.
...
Unlikely. The last anime convention I went to (last week or so), Naruto was alive and well. The drop off you see is probably very real, but a reflection of production more than anything; Naruto is notorious a little bit because the anime caught up to the manga, and so the last 90 or so episodes were just made up 'filler' (and really bad in addition to their non-canonicity). That sort of thing tries the patience of even the most loyal fan. But the new episodes based on manga released since (the 'Shippuden' episodes if I remember aright) are just starting to be released in Japan, which means they'll be over here in (a few) months, which will likely bring back all the old fans as the plot begins moving again and the characters continue growing up.
On 5/3/07, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
notorious a little bit because the anime caught up to the manga,
What a cool phrase.
Steve
By the way, the Foundation's ill-worded Think Of The Chilllllllldrennnnnnn act looks like it'll trash WikiCharts and drive away at least one productive developer:
http://brightbyte.de/page/Think_of_the_children
Note that good developers are people we're *ridiculously* short of compared to editors.
- d.
On 02/05/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Should we be reacting to these statistics in some way? Given the enormous interest in our [[Wiki]] article, should we put more effort into making it an FA?
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.
On 02/05/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
That said, hell yeah - make [[Wiki]] a feature!
Search engine hits explain that article pretty well, by the way - compare the hit rate for "Wikipedia". For better or worse, people think we are simply called "wiki"; the very high hit rate for [[Wiki]] will be people *searching for Wikipedia generally*, not finding Wikipedia articles in search results.
(It may seem a little odd to those of us used to manually entering URLs, but remember a staggeringly large fraction of users search for specific sites in order to get to them...)
But, yes. Even if it isn't what people are looking for, it's still what they see. A damn good article is, on the whole, the sort of thing we'd like them to have as their first exposure to the site...
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 02/05/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
That said, hell yeah - make [[Wiki]] a feature!
Search engine hits explain that article pretty well, by the way - compare the hit rate for "Wikipedia". For better or worse, people think we are simply called "wiki"; the very high hit rate for [[Wiki]] will be people *searching for Wikipedia generally*, not finding Wikipedia articles in search results.
Either that, or they end up on Wikipedia for some other reason, maybe for the first, second or third time, see the logo banner in the corner and think "okay, I give up, what the heck is a 'wiki'?!" and type it in the search box just below.
But yeah, your explanation probably accounts for most of the hits, and is not one that would've occurred to me. Nice lateral thinking. :)
And yeah, [[Wiki]] should definitely be an FA.
On 5/2/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Search engine hits explain that article pretty well, by the way - compare the hit rate for "Wikipedia". For better or worse, people think we are simply called "wiki"; the very high hit rate for [[Wiki]] will be people *searching for Wikipedia generally*, not finding Wikipedia articles in search results.
(It may seem a little odd to those of us used to manually entering URLs, but remember a staggeringly large fraction of users search for specific sites in order to get to them...)
Ah, I like that explanation. Though I think some people misinterpret stats like those showing how many people apparently "google" for "google". It's just that in Firefox and other browsers, you can type search terms directly in the address bar. So, why type "en.wikipedia.org" when you can type "wiki".
Heh, you know, it's actually not a bad idea. In FF, that takes you straight to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki . I wonder if it would be worth our attempting to detect this sort of search-engine magic and redirecting people back to the Main Page?
I note also that when you search for 'wiki' in google, a "submatch" is the WP main page. That's not normal...
Steve
On 5/2/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I note also that when you search for 'wiki' in google, a "submatch" is the WP main page. That's not normal...
Speaking of not normal, look at the first Google result for searching "pedia"
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
Andrew Lih wrote:
On 5/2/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I note also that when you search for 'wiki' in google, a "submatch" is the WP main page. That's not normal...
Speaking of not normal, look at the first Google result for searching "pedia"
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
Yup. That's a bit...odd.
On 5/2/07, Rich Holton richholton@gmail.com wrote:
Yup. That's a bit...odd.
Yeah. I'm trying to figure it out.
http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/12/10/weight_of_words.php
Links to those two pages using the word 'pedia'. But to lots of other WP pages too.
Steve