I’m interested in how people use Wikipedia, so I analyzed the Top 100 articles in the English Wikipedia for June and July 2007. Some observations:
- You can not extend this analysis by inference to characterize all of Wikipedia because it represents only the most popular 0.2% of the traffic of around 50 million visitors per month.
- 48% of articles are purely popular culture. Top categories include Pokemon, Anime, Movies, TV, Music, but there are also
- 14% of articles are biographies. Most of these are related to popular culture, including Princess Diana, Pop Singers, Pro Wrestlers
- 11% of articles are voyeuristic. These include the articles on Sex, erotic art, etc.
- In the month of June, Science, History and Politcs accounted for about 28% of the top 100, but that number dropped to 23% in July. Perhaps this is a reflection of how much Wikipedia is used for school work, since summer vacation starts somewhere in that time frame for many primary school kids.
- I filtered out certain articles such as the home page from this analysis. After filtering, the top 100 articles in June accounted for only about .2% of the total US traffic to Wikipedia (1,636,000/816,000,000).
- Overall about 70% of the top 100 articles are about popular culture (This certainly does not mean that 70% of all wikipedia articles or 70% of all wikipedia traffic is about popular culture).
- For one sample, I stretched the analysis from the top 100 to the top 167. The % Voyeristic went from 4% to 2.4% and other categories also changed slightly. This indicates that an analysis of the top 10,000 articles may yield different results.
One note about the data: the total article counts for July 07 is sparse for some reason. I worked around this by checking the Top 100 on July 7, July 11 and July 31. The percentage breakdown for July was pretty much the same for all three readings.
Here’s a summary data table:
Entries (RSS)