[Foundation-l] Questions about most viewed articles in 2011

Wed Jan 11 20:05:38 UTC 2012

Hi everyone,

a Swiss journalist asked me about the articles (from EN WP) most viewed 
and most edited in 2011. I am not sure if these lists are already 
available somewhere (if yes, let me know; if not, I'd be glad to make 
them available), but I since I already had a local copy of all the page 
view statistics, I "simply" read all the files ("simply", but it still 
took over hundred hour of processing time). Getting the number of edits 
(by parsing the latest database dump) was faster (still 20-30 hours).

The top pages in both cases are shown below; there are two puzzling 
entries that were already present in previous stats (see e.g. 
http://stats.grok.se/en/), and I was wondering if the fact that they are 
among the most viewed page on Wikipedia had already been discussed (I 
haven't found anything).

So, why would "404 error" and "File:Hardy_boys_cover_09.jpg" be ranked 
so high ? "404 error" is constant through the year (it may be a link 
from a 404 page on a web server, but I'd be still surprised that it is 
clicked so often), but the other is viewed in bursts (see e.g. 
http://stats.grok.se/en/201012/File:Hardy_boys_cover_09.jpg). Any idea ?

"Search" is also somewhat surprising.

Cheers,

Frédéric

Top viewed pages (only the article namespace, excluding the main page)
404_error       132676913
Facebook        42787711
Wiki    35568336
Deaths_in_2011  25662870
Google  23998921
Steve_Jobs      21111493
Search  20474010
United_States   18370040
Glee_(TV_series)        17492341
Justin_Bieber   16873558
Lady_Gaga       16603577
Sex     15698781
Wikipedia       14934576
File:Hardy_boys_cover_09.jpg    14640359
YouTube 14418365
Mark_Zuckerberg 14028765
Eminem  13820415
How_I_Met_Your_Mother   13458433
Amy_Winehouse   13131963
Adele_(singer)  12979662
The_Big_Bang_Theory     12542108
Selena_Gomez    12476268
Kim_Kardashian  12317436

Top edited pages:
16283   Deaths in 2011
9437    2011 Libyan civil war
6926    2011 Egyptian revolution
5822    2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
5749    Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster
5491    Arab Spring
5236    Occupy Wall Street
4664    American Idol (season 10)
4627    Death of Osama bin Laden
4535    List of 1000 Ways to Die episodes
4371    The Undertaker
4187    2011 Atlantic hurricane season
4004    Miss Universe 2011
3993    2011 England riots
3874    Anders Behring Breivik
3829    Muammar Gaddafi
3656    Dancing with the Stars (U.S. season 13)
3582    2011 in film
3568    Dancing with the Stars (U.S. season 12)