Fascinating how many pages in the top 20 of today of topics I have never heard of. Seems like a great way to see what is being talked about in the culture, without depending on the news?
As another post exemplifies, at least some of these pages are results of people seeing the news and looking something related on Wikipedia. So this, gets you a filter of "what are many people looking after reading the news". Wonder if it is an improvement from scanning the actual news titles...
Yeah, I thought of the same after posting. Maybe it can surface items that go around in specific groups that are being ignored by the media, but most seem to be also big in the news.
Well, it's at least somewhat of a representation of the collective consciousness in the English-speaking part of the world. Perhaps less so for the rest of the world.
Top title at this moment is 'Vijayakanth', Indian actor-politician who died on Dec. 28. Pageviews not broken-down by region but probable that isn't English-speaking interest.
Aren't there like 120 million people in India who speak English, with about 80 million who have it as their first or second language?
Good point. I just checked the Hindi page (https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=hi.wikipedia...) and the top #views there is 15,500. He was an actor since 1952, died of COVID, and Modi was among the thousands condoling. (Maybe the HI. site isn't so useful.)
He was from a Tamil-speaking state of India and not so commonly known in other regions. But Tamil Wikipedia page also has just 30K views compared to English’s 350K.
Yes, but you can switch the Wikipedia site. I am from the Netherlands and I also checked the Dutch wiki, and over there I also found some interesting articles I did not know about.
Yeah, but that also requires your local edition of Wikipedia to be good and useful, which is not always the case.
I noticed "Reacher (TV Series)" showed up. I guess we finally have a way to figure out what people are watching....
Most likely because 2nd season just dropped recently.