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Wikipedia's traffic stats are freely available to everyone. The information is aggregated such that the only question that can be answered is "how many times was page X viewed on day Y?"; things like which country the page is being viewed from need to be guessed based on things like what language it's written in.

You mixed up the policies. No Original Research is unrelated to why Bjork's Academy Awards dress has it's own Wikipedia article. No Original Research is why the article doesn't contain any new ideas or opinions by the article-writers themselves. The article accurately describes what The World has to say about the dress. The article has 13 sources cited 18 times providing external documentation for almost every sentence in the article.

The policy you wanted was "Wikipedia editors aren't allowed to decide how 'important' a topic is... Wikipedia Notability means that multiple independent Reliable Sources have published significant discussion of the subject." The World decides what is and isn't Notable, not me. As a Wikipedia editor I'm not allowed the opinion that it's embarrassment to humanity that Academy-Awards-Dresses are considered newsworthy. (I can have the opinion, but I can't delete the article based on my opinion.)

The sources include: telegraph.co.uk, shine.yahoo.com, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to the Movies You Need to Know ISBN 978-1-4405-0753-3, All about Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards ISBN 978-0-8264-1452-6, Vanity Fair magazine, Spin magazine, New York magazine, Reel Winners: Movie Award Trivia ISBN 978-1-55002-574-3, BjÃrk: wow and flutter ISBN 978-1-55022-556-3, The Advocate magazine, today.msnbc.msn.com. And there is no doubt that there are countless other uncited sources that exist. The World has clearly decided that this topic is worthy of significant published coverage.

By the way, this particular article has been getting around 55 pageviews a day. That's a lot higher than many of our more serious minor topics. Apparently there are a fair number of people coming to Wikipedia searching for this article.

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It's been over 2 hours now. Still no reversion of my edits. And these were done with an IP address, which has the highest chance of being scrutinized and reverted. Over 500 users have the page on their watchlists (source, and the page is viewed between 2000 and 5000 times a day source, making it ranked 3496th in traffic, out of over 4 million articles, therefore making it in the top 1% of most viewed articles.

Let me show you something: page view statistics from the last 90 days.

The article had ZERO hits for months ... until yesterday.

You have a point, up to a point. Some German municipal swimming pools have times for nude bathing, offer unisex group changing rooms, mixed saunas etc., which is unlikely to happen in the US. On the other hand, Wikimedia have an old porn film depicting bestiality openly accessible. Here is what German law says:

Media with pornographic content are regularly considered to be obviously and severely harmful to minors. Pornography itself is defined by the German High Court as a presentation of sexuality that is not connected to any kind of psychologically motivated human relationship and which glorifies sexual satisfaction as the only reason for human existence, often accompanied by grossly depicted genitals.

Distributing those objects to minors is illegal ( 15 I and III-VI JuSchG) and will be punished by law ( 27 JuSchG). In addition, the German penal code (Strafgesetzbuch - StGB) penalizes the dissemination of pornographic content ( 184 StGB).

Completely prohibited - even among people of legal age - are the depictions of sexual acts involving children, animals or violence. Similar regulations prohibit media with explicitly violent content.

The spreading of pornographic content and other harmful media via the internet is a criminal offence under German jurisdiction. A pornographic content on the internet is legal only if technical measures prohibit minors from getting access to the object (AVS = Age Verification System or Adult-Check-System).

http://www.bundespruefstelle.de/bpjm/information-in-english,did=33902.html

It is only because of US free speech laws that Wikimedia is able to host this. If they were in Germany, they couldn't. That video has been viewed over 100,000 times since it was first uploaded in mid-January of this year: http://stats.grok.se/commons.m/201201/File:Devoirs_de_vacances.ogv

Now, according to the text above, that video may be illegal in Germany for adults to view, let alone minors. In the UK, a film that included this specific passage got a R18 rating, which means it is restricted to private sex clubs. Yet on Wikimedia, a 6-year-old typing in "holidays" or "homework" in French in Wikipedia's multimedia search gets it as their top result and can view it. And thousands among these 100,000+ viewers to date will have been minors. That is not the type of children's education the Wikimedia Foundation gets donations for.

Hi,

My counter(?) hypothesis is that the long tail of articles grows most, and gets no to little proof-reading. Therefore I'd love to see the results normalized by (log maybe) of Page Views (from http://stats.grok.se/ ). I've also a few doubts about the quality of randomly sampled pages in general, and also whether the growth of jargon (which may or may not end up as spelling-errors has increased).

Excellently interesting piece though! Great work.

Winton

Anybody else find it ironic that the site that has descriptions of objects like the lightsaber and "events" like Battle of the Line deletes articles about actual people and/or places because they aren't noteworthy?

Well, Lightsaber has over 50 000 page views per month and the Battle of the Line received over 5000 in July. So one could objectively argue that they have more reason to be included than an entry on a non-fictional person, such as Francis Holburne.

Anybody else find it ironic that the site that has descriptions of objects like the lightsaber and "events" like Battle of the Line deletes articles about actual people and/or places because they aren't noteworthy?

Well, Lightsaber has over 50 000 page views per month and the Battle of the Line received over 5000 in July. So one could objectively argue that they have more reason to be included than an entry on a non-fictional person, such as Francis Holburne.

Anybody else find it ironic that the site that has descriptions of objects like the lightsaber and "events" like Battle of the Line deletes articles about actual people and/or places because they aren't noteworthy?

Well, Lightsaber has over 50 000 page views per month and the Battle of the Line received over 5000 in July. So one could objectively argue that they have more reason to be included than an entry on a non-fictional person, such as Francis Holburne.

It's an obvious win for OLPC's XO laptop to also have a standalone chunk of wikipedia that kids can browse offline. Their wiki has some discussion on different approaches to selecting stuff for inclusion. One is to use article traffic statistics, but apparently that weighs too heavily toward pop-culture. Another method is to combine those stats with three other factors -- "Importance rating by WikiProject, Number of internal links into the page, Number of interwiki versions of the article (i.e., other language versions)."

They ship an English subset as an "activity", and I'm pretty sure they made a Spanish language subset for some of the country projects. I gather that they also intend to produce subject-area slices for Chemistry, Biology, and so on. Not sure if that has come to pass yet.

Just for your interest: http://stats.grok.se/ is a nicely processed version of the data available on Domas Mituzas' wikistats page. Domas is one of the Wikimedia database gurus, who started as a volunteer, got hired by MySQL because of it (Wikimedia is a fine example of extreme MySQL) and was recently drafted to the Wikimedia board. Original announcement of good stats, Domas' blog post. And it is indeed every page view, close as we can get it. As you can imagine, getting data this accurate for a site as busy as Wikimedia (#8) with the budget of Wikimedia (>$0, give or take a few million) is an incredible win.

Don't forget, we have the actual readership numbers!

i.e., b*gg*r-all, as you correctly surmise ;-)

I can't vouch for the validity of these article stats, but they do appear to be legitimate.

Based on these top viewed pages, any book published using "popular" articles as a reference would be banal, amusing, and surreal. All at once.

You've got the all-time favourite internet searches "sex" and "naruto" along with recent political events, blockbuster movies and games, internet sensations and memes (2g1c, for example).

You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.

You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.

You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.

You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.

You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.