Over the past three years, Wikipedia member West.andrew.g bas been analyzing the weird and wonderful data traffic on the English-language Wikipedia. In the the latest edition of Wikipedia’s community-managed newspaper, The Signpost, he’s revealed the biggest traffic spikes on the site within that time—in the process proving that we’re all morbid sports fan. Excluding duplicate articles and DDoS attacks on the site—they don’t count, obviously—the most-viewed pages on Wikipedia in a one-hour period since January 2010 make for fairly grim reading. Take a look at the list: Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Madonna (entertainer), Osama bin Laden, The Who, Ryan Dunn, Jodie Foster. Celebrity deaths and Super Bowl, almost exclusively. That’s perhaps not surprising—they are events that pique general interest for a very short period—but it would be nice to see a little more variation in what really catches the public interest.
