Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Categorising the most read articles

I loved Jimmy's presentation at Wikimania. The slide I liked best is this one:


It shows a categorisation of the 100 most popular pages of some of the bigger Wikipedias. The premise is that some of the Wikipedias have moved away from the traditional encyclopaedic content.

At Wikimania I asked Bellayet of the Bengali Wikipedia to provide me with the numbers for his project. These numbers indicate that encyclopaedic information are really popular.

Geography 23
Science and Tech. 19
Other 16
History and historical figures 14
Culture and the arts 8
Politics and Socity 6
Sex 6
Popular Culture 4
Mathematics 3
Health 1
Current Events 0

It would be interesting to learn what articles people are looking for that they do not find. I would not be surprised when the most missed articles show what people are looking for. When these articles have been written, it will be interesting to learn how popular these articles turn out to be. Not only from internal searches but also when found through search engines.
Thanks,
GerardM

6 comments:

Circeus said...

I'm amazed by the looming presence of Geographyor Science on fr: de: ru: and es:, and wonder what factors exactly could possibly explain it. It appears obvious to me that the strong "Current events" presence of en: is due to the prominence of that element on the main page, but for the others, I cannot tell.

Minh Nguyễn said...

The Vietnamese Wikipedia’s 100 most viewed articles (year to date, including ties, excluding special pages, portals, help pages, and categories):

Category, avg. daily views, % views
Sex: 13,624 (32.6%)
History and historical figures: 7,893 (18.9%)
Geography: 5,701 (13.7%)
Politics and society: 4,846 (11.6%)
Culture and the arts: 3,449 (8.26%)
Popular Culture: 3,292 (7.88%)
Science and Tech.: 2,949 (7.06%)
Health: 0
Mathematics: 0
Total: 41,754

Of these, 16,363 (39.2%) are related to Vietnam or the overseas Vietnamese population, and 1,372 (3.29%) relate to current events.

Anonymous said...

It´s curious that spain is most interested on science articles than pop culture

Anonymous said...

It´s curious that spain is most interested on science articles than pop culture

Not only Spain but all spanish speaking countires: Máxico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Perú, Cuba...

Anonymous said...

what I think is curious is that we, Spanish people, can't find a most reliable source to look for sience information than wikipedia... I mean, it can be very reliable sometimes, but it has failures... we should know that. It's not that other countries are less interested in science, it's probably that they look for it in other places rather than wikipedia.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous (10:51), I think you´re wrong. Think in this point: experts don´t look for information in wikipedia. Nor in spanish speaking countries, neither in any other language. Everywhere they (experts) known where to find a most reliable source. So if non-expert people look for this kind of information in wikipedia, it´s clear than in spanish-speaking countries there is a bigger interest about it. And (where existing links works) is a good way to start to look for information in more reliable sources. Another point: this kind of articules has the lower level of failures, due to the fact that the editors used to be scientific-minded people.

Maybe the reason is the relative lower importance of the pop culture.