Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-10-21/Traffic report
Hiding under the covers of the Internet
We live in a harsh, uncertain world. There's an escalating war in Syria that seems to be drawing in the entire northern hemisphere, a resulting European migrant crisis, a slow rise to the boil of the unending Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and ever more school shootings in the US. But people aren't turning to Wikipedia to comprehend these things; they're turning to Wikipedia to, well, keep up with the Kardashians, follow their latest shows, and track the latest movies. Is the world hiding from itself? Or is Wikipedia not seen as a valid source for such information? Difficult questions. But then, those are in abundance these days.
For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.
As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 11 to 17, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:
Discuss this story
I think that the interpretation of Odom is off. I am one of the idiots who looked up the name, not because of any interest in that marketing sensation, but because I saw news about the person as if it were an issue and didn't know why. If we were clever with feedback, we might be able to come up with a who the hell is XXXX metric to explain the proportion of hits on any given name, though I don't know how... Wnt (talk) 12:37, 27 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
- It can be hard to parse out the reasons for popularity of pop culture topics. There is no doubt that Odom got more attention than he would otherwise due to the Kardashian connection. I'd like to think that Odom's personal tragedy itself was primarily the cause for attention, but we don't know that. Indeed, you'll see in the next Traffic Report that Justin Trudeau was #1 -- to some extent influenced not by his political success but because the internet decided he was hot.--Milowent • hasspoken 14:34, 27 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well it's interesting that Bernie Sanders made the list, but not Donald Trump. I'm not sure what to make of that. Praemonitus (talk) 19:46, 30 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]