This is a list of Wikipedia’s most popular pages, and it has a lot of questionable items on it

justinbieber

I’m not sure what’s more amazing here, the fact that Wikipedia member ‘West.andrew.g’ has spent 3 whole years downloading and analyzing data traffic across Wikipedia’s English-language pages as a research project, or the fact that right below Facebook, United States, YouTube, and Google is Justin Bieber. Sigh.

West.andrew.g has posted data from his ongoing research project to Wikipedia’s community-managed newspaper, The Signpost, and the results are pretty interesting to say the least. The results are split into two categories: long-term results collected from data from 2010 to 2012 (second image below), and short-term results that came with sharp traffic spikes (first image below) — or in other words, celebrity deaths and Super Bowl halftime performers.

shorttermwiki

longtermwiki

What surprised me the most would have to be the Wiki article being the most popular on Wikipedia. Can’t get any more meta than that. Which of these articles surprised you? Tell us in the comments!

[via Wikipedia (The Signpost), The Verge, image via iloveJB123]

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