The most viewed articles of 2024 | Hacker News Reader

The most viewed articles of 2024

en.wikipedia.org

33 pointspizza16 comments

Interesting list but note the footnote about the pages excluded from the list when they were mainly accessed by mobile devices:

>> Pages with over 94% or under 10% (including everything with "XXX" or "XXXX") of mobile views. This threshold excludes 2024 Indian Premier League, Indian Premier League and Alia Bhatt, but even if Internet in India is mostly through mobile devices, we need to be pragmatic.

Not sure what is meant by ‘being pragmatic’ but seems a bit skewed to mostly ignore these pages.

Yeah, I assume they're trying to exclude outlier/inauthentic activity, but for things of regional interest, you're going to get differing access patterns.

I use the "Most Popular Wikipedia Article Today" widget on my iPhone and all of those 3 were featured multiple times. Feels like lot of the mobile views are from people clicking on these articles just to see what's up (usually things are trending due to someone dying or a scandal). Still I'd think it should count.

I understand this is not an "official" Wikipedia list, but article in a community newspaper about Wikipedia. Yet, the notes about the list items are much more opinionated than I'd like or expect to see from Wikipedia authors.

Wikipedia discussion and edits have always been a bit of a cesspool, but most people just don't look at them (especially when US politics is concerned)

The Signpost (the newspaper) is more or less "independent", it's meta commentary on Wikipedia within Wikipedia, but it's not subject to the same extremely strict rules as articles.

There's opinion pieces, a humour section, it's really outside of the encyclopedia proper.

So you realise it's not a Wikipedia article, but also you are concerned that it is not a Wikipedia article?

Wikipedia editor of 20 years here. I’ve contributed articles and everything from famous architects and industrial designers to Unix topics. The site has absolutely become a partisan battleground in the last five years or so. Although Wikipedia historically never considered itself to be a source, some editors are aware that Google and other engines always show Wikipedia is the first result for many queries and are determined to use that power to manipulate narratives.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-launders-regime-...

I think the comment on #5 (Menendez brothers) completely misinterprets the metrics.

Wiki pageviews are often NOT a good proxy for "cultural significance" and this is very obvious here: There is a very different baseline propability to look up some "based on a true story"- criminals compared to "generic spiderman movie #23"; this does not necessarily mean that the story about the criminals was more influential/significant or anything, the same way that the pageviews on "Dr. House" don't make him more significant than literal houses...

Would be interesting to known if those articles were also entry points, e.g right after a search.

I enjoy that Trump's page views reached their peak on the day he was announced as winner. "Wait, who is this guy that we voted for?"

Is this just a count for America or Wikipedia in general. Because in that case it could also just be the rest of the world going "What the hell are you guys doing over there?"

It's for the entire world, for Americans are not really known to look up Indian Telugu-language films on Wikipedia, I presume. So your hypothesis sounds reasonable.

Not for America (or rather the US) specifically, but it's for en.wikipedia.org - the non-English-speaking rest of the world is more likely to use their own language versions of Wikipedia.

I imagine it would’ve been people waiting to see if the page was updated.

Why wouldn't it be?

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