Steve Bennett wrote:
Is there a link to that analysis? It would be
interesting to see
which are the least requested articles, for example.
I don't have that, but you can visit
http://stats.grok.se/en/200909/Mineral_County,_Montana to find out
that this article was viewed 368 times during August 2009,
whereas
http://stats.grok.se/en/200908/Tabaning_Sita_Forest_Park
was viewed only 29 times.
On sv.wikipedia there is a "gadget" for adding a "tab" to each
article, a tab that links to this "stats" website.
In word frequency analysis, the expected case is that half of the
different words in any text are used only once, a quarter is used
only twice, an eighth is used 3 or 4 times, etc. There are
different names for such models: Zipf's law, power law
distribution, long tail, and so on. More often than not, such
terms are used without fully understanding the math behind them.
This is a little different from the case of Wikipedia articles,
where some articles are perhaps never viewed. But we should
expect that a large number of articles are viewed very seldom.
So if you ask which articles are least requested, you should
probably expect a list of 1.5 million articles (of the 3 million
in the English Wikipedia). It's similar to asking which words are
least frequently used. With time, we will add another 3 million
articles about things that are even less interesting, and a few
thousand articles on more interesting topics.
It's a different case if you ask the question for a limited set of
articles, which you already know something about, for example
those about the 56 counties in Montana, which should all be
equally boring, or where interest should perhaps be proportional
to the population. Which are more or less requested? Is something
wrong with some of those articles?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se