Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-20/Traffic report

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero

This week's list is dominated by the death of Robin Williams (#1), the famous and unique American comedian and actor. Over 9 million views in a week, an extremely high number. This week no fewer than five of the top 10 articles, and nine of the top 25, are related to Williams. On August 12, when his death was announced, the article had just over 6.5 million views in one day. As far as the Report is aware, the only death to ever exceed that one-day total to date has been Steve Jobs on October 6, 2011, with 7.3 million views. And though you can't rely only on Wikipedia view counts as a measure of popularity, Williams' one-day total also exceeds those of Whitney Houston (February 12, 2012; with 5.97 million) and Michael Jackson (June 26, 2009; 5.88 million).

Perhaps more importantly, Wikipedia view counts surely have far less correlation with a subject's happiness. Did Williams know how universally he was loved? Does it matter? Williams was reportedly suffering from severe depression before his death from asphyxia (#3), and had recently been diagnosed with early-stage Parkinson's disease (#25). A tribute to Williams will be presented at the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards on August 25—no doubt one of many. In the 1989 film Dead Poets Society (#14), Williams' character's insistence that his students "carpe diem" (seize the day) is something worth keeping in mind; as Horace originally popularized the phrase in 23 BC: "carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero", or "seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next." This also translates as YOLO in 2014, but the Latin sounds much cooler.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.

For the week of August 10–16, 2014, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

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Hit count for Jackson - as I remember it Wikipedia had problems that day? So the hit count would have been much higher! Christian75 (talk) 20:41, 23 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Interesting, I hadn't heard of that possibility before. There must have been a stats issue prior to his death, as much of his June 2009 stats records is blank [1], but stats are recorded from the end of the month when he died. At User:Milowent/sandbox I have a little chart I started on most popular death viewcounts, I am sure I'm missing some high profile cases, if anyone wants to take a gander at it. The article traffic stats tool linked on the history tab only goes back to December 2007, I presume there are older sources of data too though I haven't looked for them.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 03:21, 25 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm glad this list wasn't being done ten years ago. According to a Help Desk archive from back then which I was just looking at, the most viewed articles included List of sex positions, Penis, and Pornography.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:02, 25 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can actually imagine that happening even today, though thankfully few people use Wikipedia as a porn site. --k6ka (talk | contribs) 12:13, 26 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• I'd love to see that old compilation. Articles like Sex (#158), Human penis size (#173), etc. are always fairly highly on the weekly WP:5000, which represents about the top 0.1% of the most popular articles on the project. Because these articles are steadily popular, they will always appear higher on annual compilations, e.g., for all of 2013 [2], Sex was #24.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 13:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]