Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-09-06/Traffic report

Traffic report

From Phelps to Bolt to Reddit

Week of August 14–20, 2016

The Olympics reigned again this week, shifting from swimming to track as the games neared their end. Seven of the Top 10 slots are Olympic-related, as are 15 of the Top 25. But somehow the incomprehensible internet meme Killing of Harambe still creeped into the Top 25 at #25.

In technical news in follow-up from in August, we are happy to report that this report is now using data from a revamped WP:5000 report which uses WMF's newer data feeds, thanks to Chief Traffic Data Guru West.andrew.g (not an official title). All WP:5000 reports have been re-run for 2016 and are available in that page's history. So far we don't expect the changes to have a significant effect on our charts, though it may help us exclude some spider/bot traffic, and may include Wikipedia Zero traffic not captured before. Unfortunately, however, the new WMF data does not keep records of red link hits, so the WP:TOPRED report has been retired.

For the full top-25 lists (and archives back to January 2013), see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles every week, see WP:MOSTEDITED.

The ten most popular articles for the week of August 14–20, 2016, as determined from the newly revamped WP:5000 report, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Usain Bolt	3,103,335	The rhythm of the Summer Olympics went according to prediction. As swimming and Michael Phelps (#3) finished up, track took over, and Bolt took center stage, winning gold in both the 100 m and 200 m, for the third straight time. And he also won his third straight gold in the 4 × 100 m relay. Being regularly called the "greatest sprinter of all time" is not hyperbole at this point. An impressive 3.1 million views lead the chart, though well shy of the astounding 5.4 million views Phelps got last week.
2	2016 Summer Olympics	2,125,265	Holding steady at #2 for a second week, a drop of about 150,000 views.
3	Michael Phelps	1,946,890	Down from #1 last week.
4	P. V. Sindhu	1,858,843	Last week we noted that although India at the 2016 Summer Olympics was at #23 (#16 this week), the country had won no medals yet. Sindu became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic silver medal, in badminton. (And to tell you how lame American television coverage is, I had no idea badminton was a sport in the Olympics.) Sindhu was one of only two medalists from India, the second being a bronze won in women's wrestling by Sakshi Malik. Of course India's lack of medal haul regularly produces articles asking why. They are just SPORTS, people. Let's celebrate those who compete and shine.
5	Suicide Squad (film)	1,254,079	DC Comics' ramshackle crew of press-ganged supervillains, forced to do the will of a shadowy organization or let their heads explode, are the stars of one of the most anticipated films in the nascent DC Cinematic Universe, which was released on August 5 to generally negative reviews. Nonetheless, it grossed $267 worldwide in its opening weekend.
6	Simone Biles	935,583	The 19-year-old Olympic first-timer from America completed her medal haul with four golds (including the team competition) and one bronze.
7	Stranger Things (TV series)	920,502	This Netflix science-fiction series is basically an 8-hour homage to early 80s kid-centric flicks like E.T., The Goonies and Explorers, though aimed mostly at adults. It has been a smash hit for Netflix, evidenced by its continuing appearance on this chart – five straight weeks. The Internet has seized on even the most mundane facets of the show, such as turning minor character "Barb" into a celebrity.
8	2012 Summer Olympics medal table	874,861	With over 250,000 more views than 2016 Summer Olympics medal table (#18). Everyone likes to do their statistical comparison it seems.
9	Decathlon	850,348	The competition in this traditional Olympic event was won by American Ashton Eaton (#12). Women compete in the seven-event heptathlon. Both events derive from the five-event pentathlon of the Ancient Olympic Games.
10	Rustom (film)	780,159	This Indian crime thriller featuring Akshay Kumar (pictured) was released 12 August 2016.

MW

Week of August 21–27, 2016

Hello again, Reddit. One of the discoveries the Top 25 project has made over the years is that the site Reddit, which bills itself as "the front page of the Internet" because Wikipedia doesn't, has been a major factor in driving traffic here. It has also proven to be a massive justification for every quirky, oddball page that manages to make it through the deletion process, as these are frequently the most popular. In the past I've made impassioned defences of Reddit and its role in aiding Wikipedia, pointing out that our site has done little to draw people's attention to the information it conveys, leaving that job to Reddit and Google Doodles. I still feel that way, at least, for the section of Reddit that nearly always makes it here: TIL, or "Today I Learned". Comments on TIL threads seem to be fairly civil and genuinely inquisitive, but those make up only a tiny fraction of Reddit's user base. But, it is not those threads that best exemplify Reddit; rather it is the river of bile and toxicity that has flowed from the Killing of Harambe that best illustrates what Reddit has become. These days Reddit is mostly famous in the wider media as a den of race hate, misogyny, borderline paedophilia, and every other objectionable but not strictly illegal form of behaviour. The commitment of the site's owners to free speech has meant that many of their topic threads, or subreddits, have become echo chambers of vitriol, as those who disagree are shouted down or chased off. One writer for Time magazine has written Reddit off as unsalvageable. As such, I think Wikipedia would be better off taking on more of the job of spreading word of its content.

The ten most popular articles for the week of August 21 to 27, 2016, as determined from the newly revamped WP:5000 report, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Notes
1	SummerSlam 2016	N/A	1,102,249	WWE's latest pay-per-view pantomime was held on August 21, 2016 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York with the headline bout "won" by Brock Lesnar (pictured)
2	2016 Summer Olympics		1,019,002	Numbers are down by half, but the article is still holding at #2. The closing ceremony was held on August 21, the first day recorded by this list, so interest in the Olympics clearly has faded quickly. It will be interesting to see what will happen when the Paralympics get underway.
3	Stranger Things (TV series)		933,503	This Netflix science-fiction series is basically an eight-hour homage to early-80s kid-centric flicks like E.T., The Goonies and Explorers, though aimed mostly at adults. It has been a smash hit for Netflix, evidenced by its continuing appearance on this chart – six straight weeks. The Internet has seized on even the most mundane facets of the show, such as turning minor character "Barb" into a celebrity. Numbers have not shifted particularly since last week, but with the overall low view count it has let it rise four slots.
4	Suicide Squad (film)		776,092	DC Comics' ramshackle crew of press-ganged supervillains, forced to do the will of a shadowy organization or let their heads explode, are the stars of one of the most anticipated films in the nascent DC Cinematic Universe, which was released on August 5 to generally negative reviews. Nonetheless, it grossed $267M worldwide in its opening weekend.
5	UFC 202	N/A	759,740	The latest Ultimate Fighting Championship was held on August 20 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The headlining bout was a rematch between UFC Featherweight Champion Conor McGregor (pictured) and Nate Diaz, who had defeated McGregor at UFC 196. McGregor won this bout by majority decision.
6	Killing of Harambe		735,203	What began as a heartfelt reaction to what some felt was the unnecessary killing of a silverback western lowland gorilla (pictured, though not him specifically) has morphed over the last three months into online trolling and racist abuse, along with the standard targeted misogyny. What the troll army hopes to accomplish is never clear, but whatever it is it doesn't involve helping gorillas.
7	Blonde (Frank Ocean album)		722,611	The long-delayed album from rapper and R&B artist Frank Ocean was released exclusively on Apple Music on August 20 to near-universal acclaim.
8	Tic Tac		711,441	As learned on a Reddit thread this week, Tic Tacs are almost pure sugar, but small enough to be considered sugar-free per serving. Interestingly, the two other Reddit threads linked to this article also noticed the same thing.
9	Frank Ocean		697,461	See #7
10	Deaths in 2016		617,084	The views for the annual list of deaths are remarkably consistent on a day to day basis. It was consistently higher in the first half of 2016 owing to a string of highly notable deaths, but things seem to be calming down a bit.

S

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Influence of Reddit on Wikipedia pageviews

Reddit is part of the tiny "other referrers" rectangle in this chart

Regarding "Reddit, which bills itself as 'the front page of the Internet' because Wikipedia doesn't, has been a major factor in driving traffic here":

That's probably true if "here" means the Top 25 pages, and in any case there is no doubt that the traffic of an individual page linked from a popular Reddit can spike considerably. (By the way, there is an academic paper about this, which we haven't yet covered in the "recent research" section - if anyone is interested in writing a review, let me know; otherwise I might possibly do it myself in our next issue a month from now.)

However, before we get too excited (or worried) about Reddit's "role in aiding Wikipedia", let's not forget that the top 25 articles receive only a tiny, tiny sliver of Wikipedia's pageviews overall, where the ratio of Reddit referrals is so small that it was not even called out separately in the above chart (from this 2015 research). Of course I absolutely agree that it's worth thinking about how to better draw people's attention to the information on Wikipedia (there has already been quite a bit of work on this by editors, the Foundation and other Wikimedia organizations, but there may be many more opportunities that we have not made use of fully yet).

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:03, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

PS: Out of curiosity, I ran the actual numbers (for August 24, the day after the TIL for Tic Tac was posted). On that day, 0.5% of pageviews on the English Wikipedia had a referrer from Reddit - so very much not dominant, although still twice as large as the traffic coming from Facebook. The Tic Tac article itself though had 81% of its pageviews coming directly from Reddit.

Extended content

Data source:

SELECT SUM(IF(referer LIKE '%google.%',1,0))/SUM(1) AS google,
SUM(IF(referer LIKE '%.facebook.com/%',1,0))/SUM(1) AS facebook,
SUM(IF(referer LIKE '%.bing.com/%',1,0))/SUM(1) AS bing,
SUM(IF(referer LIKE '%.yahoo.com/%',1,0))/SUM(1) AS yahoocom,
SUM(IF(referer LIKE '%.reddit.com/%',1,0))/SUM(1) AS reddit,
SUM(1) AS allviews
FROM wmf.webrequest WHERE year = 2016 AND month = 8 AND day = 24
AND is_pageview 
AND agent_type  = 'user'
AND normalized_host.project = 'en'
AND normalized_host.project_class = 'wikipedia';
google	facebook	bing	yahoocom	reddit	allviews
0.3600752916003187	0.0023931338194005474	0.014221534826641381	0.008654790611702571	0.00523757841064597	254312565
1 row selected (396.326 seconds)

SELECT SUM(IF(referer LIKE '%.reddit.com/%',1,0)) AS redditrefs,
SUM(1) AS allviews
FROM wmf.webrequest WHERE year = 2016 AND month = 8 AND day = 24
AND agent_type  = 'user'
AND normalized_host.project = 'en'
AND normalized_host.project_class = 'wikipedia'
AND pageview_info['page_title'] = 'Tic_Tac';
redditrefs	allviews
263560	324843
1 row selected (214.299 seconds)

The webrequest database used in this query is not public; for privacy reasons only some WMF staff under an NDA have access. But if someone is interested in related data and takes it on themselves to modify the above queries accordingly, I might be able to run it for them if they post a request as described here.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 07:21, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Tbayer (WMF), that paper does look interesting, I'll give it closer read and see if I can't write something up about it. And yes you are correct that the commentary was referring to articles making the Top 25. Redditors on TIL clearly use wikipedia's vast store of articles to find interesting things to highlight, and thus random articles will make the Top 25 as a result. I don't think this is bad, if anything it probably influences why reddit seems to like wikipedia so much.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 03:08, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Can we talk about how the Signpost allowed a biased and factually-incorrect rant be published for all the world to see? Also, wouldn't Wikipedia trying to push popular articles force the site to cater to clicks and go down the road of clickbait that has befallen many other websites? 24.113.234.93 (talk) 20:59, 8 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@24.113.234.93: No and no. The folks that do this report always do a bang-up job. You're welcome. Chris Troutman (talk) 01:51, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The commentary above that you complain about is not really about articles that make the Top 25, but about other well known issues with Reddit. I am on reddit and aware of these issues, as are many of us. Don't take it personally.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 03:01, 10 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost is looking for new talent.

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