| “ | "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Fact. Making it even better? Its public list of stats, shedding light on what the collective world is thinking about."[1] | ” |
The popular pages from December 1, 2007, to the present demonstrates human interests during that period. The views data for Wikipedia's first years (2001–2007) is fragmentary and complete data on mobile views is available only since July 1, 2015. This presently (until the age of advanced electronic archeology) precludes the possibility of all-time ranking with the multiyear perspective being the closest we can get to.
The lists below include desktop views since December 1, 2007, and mobile views since July 1, 2015. For consolation, with this data we are very close to the all time ranking and will ever be closer. Wikipedia logged significantly less views before the count started in December 2007. Wikipedia reached the top 10 of Alexa.com in March 2007,[2] only half a year earlier, and before May 2003 Wikipedia had not even been on this list of 3000 websites.[3] Moreover, as views accumulate over time, the pre-2007 views become ever less significant. Even if known, they would not alter either the ranking, or views counted in hundreds of millions.
Being one of the best indicators of "what the collective world is thinking about," the list of most viewed Wikipedia pages receives wide attention in unassociated institutions and external popular media sources. One scholar in 2007 was puzzled why Wikipedia does not offer a "most viewed" or "most popular" feature on its site that can be easily found, as is the case on some contemporary highly visited sites, such as YouTube, Digg or Del.icio.us.[4]
University of Milan created an engine of the complete yearly ranking of all Wikipedia articles for 2014–2021.[5] In 2013 the BBC published an article discussing most searched Wikipedia articles in 2012 in different languages.[6] Other versions of top-lists for shorter periods are regularly published and discussed by external popular media.[7][8][9][10][11][12]
- ^ Wolff-Mann, Ethan (October 23, 2014). "The 25 Most Popular Articles On Wikipedia In August". Thrillist.
- ^ "Wikipedia.org is more popular than... - Meta". meta.wikimedia.org.
- ^ Wikipedia:Milestones 2003 entry for May 22
- ^ Spoerri, Anselm (April 2, 2007). "What is popular on Wikipedia and why?". First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v12i4.1765 – via firstmonday.org.
- ^ The engine allows to chart pages by categories and rank pages by views, links, or combination of both ("harmonic centrality"). "The Open Wikipedia Ranking," http://wikirank.di.unimi.it/faq.html
- ^ "Wikipedia's most searched articles of the year revealed". BBC News. December 28, 2012.
- ^ Gao, George (January 14, 2016). "Most visited Wikipedia articles by language in 2015".
- ^ Sonnad, Nikhil (January 7, 2015). "The top-viewed Wikipedia page for every day of 2014". Quartz.
- ^ "The Most Popular Pages on Wikipedia in 2012: Facebook, One Direction and … Cul De Sacs?".
- ^ Quain, John (March 25, 2015). "What I learned from Wikipedia's most popular articles of 2012". Fox News.
- ^ Price, Gary (December 31, 2013). "The Top 100 Most Viewed Articles on Wikipedia During 2013". Library Journal infoDOCKET.
- ^ "Wikipedia's most-viewed articles in 2012 were..." CNET.