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Hopper to the top

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By Serendipodous

As regular readers of this page may have gleaned by now, I'm something of a cynic; I have little to no faith in humanity, a position not helped by the topics making frequent visitations to this list. Wikipedia offers all the knowledge of humanity to the world (at varying levels of accuracy); despite this, most people seem to want to use it either to keep track of celebrity scandals, as a free TV listings guide or, rather oddly, a noticeboard for the deaths of famous people.

Last week saw the deaths of both Paul Walker, an action star who outside of his signature Fast and Furious franchise had not had a major hit, and Nelson Mandela, a global hero and inspiration to millions of people—one in a car crash, the other peacefully in his sleep. When Walker's death generated 7.4 million hits over Mandela's 4.2 million, I initially concluded that the public had been drawn to the ghoulish nature of Walker's demise over the far more historically significant, if uneventful, passing of Mandela. And yet ... Mandela's death was relatively late in the week; Walker's had occurred right at the start. Maybe the stats were lying; after all, day-to-day, Mandela's death was generating twice the hits of Walker's. So I waited a week, and, well, Walker's death still generated more hits in its first week than Mandela's did. In its first ten days. So, OK. Apparently people are far more attached to the Fast and Furious series than I ever knew.

In other news, an animated Google Doodle for computer programmer and naval rear admiral Grace Hopper generated another record-breaking hit count for the year, though the count for the list overall was lower than for that of the previous holder.

See WP:TOP25 for the full top-25 report.

For the week of December 8–14, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages* were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Grace Hopper C-class 9,412,775
Animated Google Doodles always bring in the numbers, but this record-breaking surge is not something you'd expect to see unless India's involved. Still, it's not hard to see what drew people to Grace Hopper; not only was she a woman in a still-male-dominated field, but a US Navy Rear Admiral to boot. She graduated first in her Naval class, despite being 15 pounds under stipulated minimum weight, and also popularized the word "debugging" to describe fixing computer glitches.
2 Nelson Mandela Good Article 2,549,220
The 95-year-old father of the new South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize winner and global inspiration finally succumbed to his long illness on December 5, triggering tributes from around the world.
3 Bonnie and Clyde C-class 1,338,252
The killing and robbing duo got a spike of interest this week when The History Channel launched a cross-channel event to promote a docudrama about them. Despite the venue, this film is not being hailed for historical accuracy; according to The Guardian's Erin McGann, "if you're a fan of the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, stay away. And if you have even a passing familiarity with the real-life story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker … stay far, far away."
4 Paul Walker C-class 526,200
The tragic death on the road of this Hollywood star remains a major talking point.
5 United States B-Class 484,089
The third most popular Wikipedia article between 2010 and 2012, and a perpetual bubble-under-er. Not really surprising that the country with by far the most English speakers would be the most popular on the English Wikipedia.
6 Facebook B-class 477,654
A perennially popular article
7 Apartheid in South Africa C-class 413,876
The death of Nelson Mandela led to renewed attention for the atrocious system he suffered to end.
8 Frozen (2013 film) C-class 390,297 Disney's de facto sequel to Tangled has already outperformed its predecessor in its first two weeks, having grossed over $264 million worldwide.
9 Deaths in 2013 List 388,959
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
10 Bitcoin C-Class 354,188
The digital currency is back in the news this week. Bankers have suggested it may prove a legitimate competitor to real money, even though they are best described as a store of value rather than a functional currency. An attempt to declare "Bitcoin Black Friday" to try to get people to actually spend them instead of hoarding them (Except that, from one point of view, hoarding them is exactly the right thing to do if their value continues to skyrocket as it has done) led to the purchase of a great deal of gold, swapping one store of value another.
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18 December 2013 (all comments)
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    Grace Hopper

    Actually, the term debugging predates Hopper, though she no doubt helped to popularize its use: see [1]. — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 08:57, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

    Thanks. Changed it to "popularized". Serendipodous 09:39, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    It initially referred to actual "bugs" getting fried by the heat of tubes in the earliest computers causing problems. ENIAC is (partly) on display at UPenn. A moth is in the Smithsonian alleged to be the first real "computer bug" Hopper referred to in anecdotes. The use of "bug" meaning "problem" appears to antedate the computer age, alas. [2] Collect (talk) 14:09, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Incorrect. The term bug for a flaw in a machine is much older than ENIAC (dating to the 1800s, I believe). The moth that died in the machine was actually described as the "first bug" in the notes, demonstrating that it term was a joke and that the operators already knew the word before the bug died in there. Ego White Tray (talk) 15:50, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    The article I referred to in my earlier post says: "As Alexander Magoun and Paul Israel explain in an article earlier this year in the newspaper of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 'bug' appeared in Edison's notebooks as early as 1876 to describe problems in his systems. 'Awful lot of bugs still,' read one notebook entry about a plan for incandescent lighting. He also developed what he called a 'bug trap' to catch relay errors in his early telegraph system. Within a couple of decades, Edison's usage of 'bug' became common enough to enter dictionaries. 'A fault in the working of a quadruplex telegraph or in any electrical apparatus,' was how Funk and Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary of the English Language defined it in 1893." The OED's earliest quotation for bug in this sense is from an 1889 issue of the Pall Mall Gazette: "Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble." — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 17:52, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

    Cynicism

    You are choosing to look at this cynically. Think of the 9+ million views of Grace Hopper...I bet few people in the world were even aware of this individual, much less knew anything about her contributions to computer science and now they do! I think we have to give Google credit for often selecting significant but lesser known scientists and artists to feature in their Google Doodle.

    And you also need to think about what it means to be in the Top 10 articles viewed on Wikipedia over the course of a week. There are plenty of articles that might garner more views over the course of a year than any of these topics on a weekly list but those are articles of perennial interest. Being a trending article means that there has to be some time-based reason that motivates a large amount of people to seek out specific information they are looking for. So, we aren't going to see Organic chemistry or Love in the Time of Cholera on a Top 10 list, it's going to be news-based events, occurring at a specific point in time and people are coming to Wikipedia to find immediate answers. Of course, in the cases of deaths of well-known people, readers come to Wikipedia to find out the specifics of the person's passing or, if they aren't familiar with the individual, try to find out why they are notable.

    I worked with trends on Twitter for two years, whether the trending topics were unbelievably frivolous, and I believe you must put aside judging them. They are what they are and are nothing more than that. They aren't a sign of intelligence, taste or what is of ultimate importance. They are just an indication of what is of interest to a lot of English-speaking people for a very short period of time. They aren't good of bad, they are just a sign of what, in this moment, people are curious about and that is heavily influenced by online conversations and news reports. Liz Read! Talk! 02:00, 20 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

    To editor Serendipodous: While I appreciate your excellent volunteer effort in writing for The Signpost, I think the amount of editorialization in this column is becoming worrisome. Present the traffic report. Congratulations on having the freedom to make sardonic comments about the listed articles. Do not deign to think we need a paragraph of your opinions at the outset of the article, too. This is a Wikipedia report, not your personal blog entry. Chris Troutman (talk) 03:57, 20 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    The editorialisation was kinda necessary this week because I made a judgment call last week that didn't pan out. I felt it was better just to come clean about it rather than brush it under the carpet. Serendipodous 07:59, 20 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Actually, I rather enjoy reading the compiler's take on what the figures may or may not suggest, though Liz is right in that the figures are really just a snapshot of what people happen to be interested in that week. I guess people will always be more interested to find out the circumstances of the sudden, tragic death of a young person (especially one who is a Hollywood star) than the demise of someone in his 90s who has been ill for many years, regardless of how famous the latter person is. — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 09:39, 20 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    It's likely that the reason the Mandela page views were relatively low was that every major news service published detailed obituaries of him at the time his death was announced. This obviously wasn't the case for Walker (though the level of interest in him does seem surprising). Nick-D (talk) 00:16, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    @Chris troutman: In my opinion it is more than a matter of editorialization -- it is a case of blatant missing journalistic integrity, and I am surprised the Signpost allows it.
    In the traffic report of 28 August 2013 the author said in the comment section that he/she arbitrarily removed one of the top ten entries from the list using a judgement call. Again in the traffic report of 9 October 2013 he/she said two other entries were routinely removed.
    I stopped reading this "report" because it is an opinion piece pretending it is an unbiased report. XOttawahitech (talk) 15:30, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think I've ever pretended to be unbiased. That's kinda the point. Most people complain that I act too biased. But I realised early on that, given the necessarily biased nature of the selection (I have to make a call as to which listed items are genuine and which are due to spambots, after all) it would be somewhat hypocritical to pretend to be unbiased. I do specifically note every item or group of items I remove at the bottom of the top 25 report, though; if that's not enough, you can always look at the raw data and draw your own conclusions. Serendipodous 18:32, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    The Signpost needs your help putting together the next issue.

















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