One very curious thing I ran into today: this morning I woke up and when I checked my phone, the (Spanish) Wikipedia page for Cleopatra was open on my browser. I didn't myself open that intentionally, but I thought I must have accidentally tapped on some links while I was asleep, and ended up there.
But now I see this website and it turns out that "Cleopatra" is consistently one of the most visited pages in the Spanish Wikipedia. Odd! I googled and it turns out that it's because it's one of the example queries in Google Assistant (source, in Spanish: https://www.elespanol.com/omicrono/software/20230118/cleopat... ). I must have tapped on it without realising. And like me, thousands of others, every day! Fascinating
Funny you mention that. I was also confused by this same experience! I was recently introduced to the theory that most of the internet is bot activity and very little legitimate user activity. I think from a pure ratio perspective that’s very true, and this list made me ask “this is what people want to know about?” I was hoping to see people researching higher level queries, most of this seems like film and tv or fairly basic concepts like “sex”.
Makes sense to me that only very popular and generic stuff makes the top of the list. Even if Wikipedia was used more for high level queries in aggregate, there’s so many possible things people could be looking into that it’s necessarily more spread out than whatever is popular this week.
Bots don’t consume nearly as much bandwidth as people, they generally don’t care about assets like images or videos and the don’t download millions of copies of 100GB games. But they can make a very high volume of requests.
The reason of so many entries being made up of "Indian interests", is because the cheap internet provided by Reliance Jio.
Purely speculation on my part, but I have seen more internet presence of Indian public after Reliance Jio.
That and affordable or cheap even Android phones being easily available.
As there's 1.4 billion of us, it was bound to happen at some point, but I think Reliance Jio's cheap internet and easily available smartphones are the catalyst.
Although Jio was the one to trigger a step change in pricing, other telecom players eventually had to offer data plans at competitive rates. I wouldn't attribute these numbers to Jio alone, instead to generally cheap internet in India
Jio only gained prominence in the early 2010s. While yes it did definitely help in getting more Indians access to cheap data plans, the country by and large has had a large English speaking population connected to the internet – enough to prominently show up on graphs – since well before that.
I would highly contest that. It's certainly not "The" reason, unless this is an advertisement. Jio is not even the cheapest option anymore in many places. I think your assessment is outdated. Indian people are at par with their Inrernet usage as the most of the world, it's just that there are a LOT of us in the world. That's "the" reason - Population.
The cost of my internet connection has little bearing on how much I browse Wikipedia.
Even YouTube I watch with little regard to internet cost, since on 144p it's only 100 MB for an hour of video. Obviously I do pay attention to the quality setting, because the bill can get huge fast if on HD!
Um, I think you need to rethink this comment bearing in mind that a large proportion of people in the world don't have the money for a monthly internet bill at all.
Seems like she (daughter) planned it or at least provided the weapon, but the person who actually did it was her boyfriend and is now serving life without possibility of parole. Kind of a crazy sentence considering the 'victim' truly had it coming (tortured her daughter for years, with unnecessary surgeries, feeding tube, etc)
It makes sense once you've read the article. Not everyday a person who has been through something so unusual and awful with multiple media interpretations gets released.
Yes and also there are many that never use the address bar, they just google names. With this mindset, any text input with a lens icon is a way to reach pages... or sites... apps, stuff, whatever.
I do it. I don't know how to explain why but these pages sometimes contain more information than people think. Like the critics, key-people, government involvement, controversies, etc. And the best part is that I can trust this information to be neutral and factually correct.
> And the best part is that I can trust this information to be neutral and factually correct.
Relatively compared to other sources, sure, but not absolutely. Wikipedia supereditors have their own biases that are obvious when reading articles on topics one has expert knowledge on.
given the position of "sex" and "xxx" on the list, it seems like it's either misclicks, or just the worldwide population of teenage boys searching for things and ending up on wikipedia, probably because the site they're actually trying to get to is blocked.
People may be looking up details about these sites.
Also, not for these specifically, but if someone tells me about a website I haven't heard of, and not sure if safe / SFW etc I'll usually checkout it's Wikipedia page first.
They may be, but are this many people really looking up details about 2017's XXX: Return of Xander Cage? "XXX" makes a couple other appearances on the list, so I'm inclined to believe there really is a good amount of traffic being directed to Wikipedia by accident from search users.
I was trying to find about public interest in Christmas and found these tools, if you know any other feel free to share.
There is also different tool that allows to plot wiki page views across many languages over time, [1] Google trends was also useful [3] (hint: click Include low search volume regions)
Another interesting tool shows the pageviews geographic distribution across all languages to all Wikipedias, but has not been updated for years [2]
I find it interesting that the top results are recent topics. In most cases, they appear to be folks getting context for news or other timely events, or something else they saw or heard about in the media.
Yes long tail yadda yadda, but it's an interesting reflection of what we want to learn about or reference: actors, singers, recent movies, and every once in a while, something else.
It's interesting that others seems to go the same route as I do for movies and TV shows and just use Wikipedia rather than IMDB. IMDB has become so awful to use and shows no sign of improving. Apparently IMDB don't believe that they have any competition and over the years people have just started to add the same information to Wikipedia.
If one has an IMDb account it's possible to get a "reference view" by default which looks better in my opinion (old IMDb-style): "Account Settings" - "Content Settings" - "Show reference view".
IMDb is owned by Amazon. They use it for the Prime Video X-Ray functionality. IMDbPro is probably useful for some members of the industry (at $20 per month). Apart from that, the user ratings and reviews are still kind of useful.
Readit News
But now I see this website and it turns out that "Cleopatra" is consistently one of the most visited pages in the Spanish Wikipedia. Odd! I googled and it turns out that it's because it's one of the example queries in Google Assistant (source, in Spanish: https://www.elespanol.com/omicrono/software/20230118/cleopat... ). I must have tapped on it without realising. And like me, thousands of others, every day! Fascinating
Bots don’t consume nearly as much bandwidth as people, they generally don’t care about assets like images or videos and the don’t download millions of copies of 100GB games. But they can make a very high volume of requests.
Purely speculation on my part, but I have seen more internet presence of Indian public after Reliance Jio.
That and affordable or cheap even Android phones being easily available.
As there's 1.4 billion of us, it was bound to happen at some point, but I think Reliance Jio's cheap internet and easily available smartphones are the catalyst.
Deleted Comment
Even YouTube I watch with little regard to internet cost, since on 144p it's only 100 MB for an hour of video. Obviously I do pay attention to the quality setting, because the bill can get huge fast if on HD!
EDIT: Ah, her daughter was released from prison today. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67833339
She may have killed her mother but doing so was not too far from self defense in my mind.
So that if you write "youtube" without the .com the browser will direct you to wikipedia instead.
Relatively compared to other sources, sure, but not absolutely. Wikipedia supereditors have their own biases that are obvious when reading articles on topics one has expert knowledge on.
Excuse me, what?
Wikipedia is great. But assuming it's neutral and factually correct is delusional.
Like with every single organization made up of human beings, power dynamics and censorship are part of Wikipedia.
It's still the less bad one, but no one should trust it that blindly.
https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia...
Also, not for these specifically, but if someone tells me about a website I haven't heard of, and not sure if safe / SFW etc I'll usually checkout it's Wikipedia page first.
There is also different tool that allows to plot wiki page views across many languages over time, [1] Google trends was also useful [3] (hint: click Include low search volume regions)
Another interesting tool shows the pageviews geographic distribution across all languages to all Wikipedias, but has not been updated for years [2]
[1] https://www.wikishark.com/?text_search=&values=9264937%2C245...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WiViVi
https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/animations/wivivi/wivi...
https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPage...
[3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Noël,Wei...
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1LT2cR70h366WwTzVZs2VB
Yes long tail yadda yadda, but it's an interesting reflection of what we want to learn about or reference: actors, singers, recent movies, and every once in a while, something else.
(Edit: fixed ambiguious wording)