Photo: Flickr user lifeontheedge

Monday, August 28, 2006

WikiCharts tracks the most popular wikipedia articles. As usual, people are interested in sex and space travel. (The tool counts pageviews, not searches from the wikipedia mainpage, so google's probably playing a big role. And it's only 2 days running, so expect big fluctuations.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi - link seems to be down/non-functioning. Any info?

Tracking article popularity has been a huge weakness to Wikipedia for a long time - if editors know an article is popular and being read they will work harder to improve it. It also draws attention to good quality articles through wisdom of the crowds, the Google model.

Ben Yates said...

Looks like it's back up.

Ben Yates said...

I do think that the popularity aspect tends to work even without explicit tracking: more-read articles are also more-read by potential editors -- this will help make the correllation closer, though.