The Signpost

Traffic report

Wikipedia watches the referendum in Scotland

This could be the beginning of a new era for this list. Until now, decisions to remove suspicious content have been largely educated guesswork. This week though, we have a new collaborator who can shine a light on the origins and patterns, sorting once and for all the webwheat from the cyberchaff. Of course, it also means we will have to start including articles we would have once excluded, regardless of whether we can find a reason or not. So expect a lot more certainty and a lot more bewilderment. Bewilderment pretty much sums up the state of the world right now, as Britain recovers from its brief flirtation with non-existence, and ISIS continues to provoke the West.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.

For the week of September 14 to 20, 2014, 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 Scottish independence referendum, 2014 C-class 921,412
Well, the Nationalists' overnight surge that actually made the dismemberment of Britain seem plausible for a moment, and captured the romantic imaginings of the English-speaking world, turned out to be a ghost, as the Scots ultimately voted as they'd always said they would: a small but decent majority in favour of staying together. Now the only question is where to go from here. Thankfully, we have loads of international crises to distract us from that question.
2 Scotland Good Article 585,032
The land of Rabbie Burns and Walter Scott, whisky and haggis, Braveheart and Trainspotting became the focus of the Anglosphere's attention this week, thanks to the whiffs of freedom drifting from a few late polls. No doubt the fact that sizeable populations in Britain's many onetime overseas colonies can trace their ancestry back there played a role as well.
3 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant C-class 548,101
Numbers are down a bit from last week, but since this week closed before Barack Obama's decision to bomb ISIS bases in Syria without Syria's permission, expect them to skyrocket in the next update.
4 Deaths in 2014 List 414,034
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article.
5 Ruin value Stub-class 408,271
Ruin value, or ruinenwert, is a term employed by the Nazis, who believed that buildings should be designed so that their ruins would be aesthetically pleasing, as discussed on a Reddit thread this week.
6 United Kingdom B-Class 407,637
The nation in which I happen to live managed to escape dismemberment this week, but, like a man waking up with a hangover, we have many questions regarding what exactly just happened and where we go from here.
7 Facebook B-class 396,115
A perennially popular article.
8 Theodore Roosevelt B-class 395,077
The first President Roosevelt was one of several members of his family to get noticed this week, thanks to the launch of the latest Ken Burns miniseries, The Roosevelts, on PBS on 14 September.
9 Google Good Article 355,244
Always a fairly popular article.
10 Franklin D. Roosevelt B-class 343,715
The longest-serving American president got his dues for the same reason his fourth cousin once removed did (see #8).

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-09-24/Traffic_report