Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-16/Traffic report

Traffic report

World Cup dominates for another week

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This week it's still more and more World Cup, with five entries out of the top ten (and 14 out of the Top 25). While tennis and pop culture make a few cameo appearances, the Indonesian presidential election is the only hard news subject to draw sufficient attention to make the list. Since this week's data goes through 13 July, the date of the World Cup final, next week should see a great shift to other topics of interest.

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

For the week of 7 to 13 July 2014, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Views	Notes
1	Amazon.com	1,234,236	The Amazon.com article suddenly reappeared in the top 25 a few months ago after a long absence; then it was No. 5 two weeks ago (466,100 views), and dropped out again last week (247,821). It had a big jump again this past week, all the way up to No. 1. It's always difficult to determine the reasons for the popularity of website articles (how many are simply misaimed clicks on the Google search list?), but another round of stories about Amazon and drones, as well as a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit complaining that Amazon is promoting in-app purchases by children may have contributed to this article's extreme popularity this week.
2	2014 FIFA World Cup	1,179,986	Down from 1,604,100 views last week, the tournament came to a close on 13 July with Germany defeating Argentina in the final match.
3	FIFA World Cup	1,049,265	The broader article on the history of the World Cup competition may have been accessed by people looking for the long view, but in truth it was probably more to do with people looking for the more specific article above. Up from 758,356 views last week.
4	Indonesian presidential election, 2014	653,933	The presidential election in Indonesia was held on 9 July, though results are not due until July 20. The race pits Prabowo Subianto and Hatta Rajasa against Joko Widodo and Jusuf Kalla.
5	Laverne Cox	552,258	The American transgender actress became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy award in an acting category; she was nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black.
6	Lionel Messi	470,138	The Argentine forward and captain of the national team is a contender for the title of "best footballer on the planet", though he was unable to lead his team to victory in the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final on July 13.
7	Neymar	465,282	Brazil's star footballer retained great readership interest despite being knocked out by an injury in their July 4 match against Colombia. His absence led to Brazil's crushing loss in its next match against Germany; Neymar reportedly turned off his television to play poker after Germany scored its seventh (and final) goal.
8	Brazil national football team	451,828	Despite the heartbreaking loss to Germany, Brazil's fans can take solace in the fact that they have won five World Cup championships, more than any other country (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002).
9	Novak Djokovic	445,169	Djokovic won the men's singles title at the 2014 Wimbledon Championships on July 6, which day saw the bulk of the week's views for this entry.
10	Transformers: Age of Extinction	444,905	This action film, the fourth in the live-action Transformer film series, is down from #2 last week.

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Amazon looks like manipulation (bots etc). See Amazon.com_controversies, a "main article" link in Amazon.com. If there were really that many people going to Amazon.com, some of it would bleed over to Amazon.com_controversies because some readers would click through as they read the article. But there is no corresponding traffic spike. -- GreenC 22:11, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It may be manipulation but I did not feel it was certain enough to exclude. Your observation is an interesting hypothesis. Unfortunately the Amazon.com_controversies page has such a small average viewcount (about 225 views a day) that very few readers seem to be clicking through to that page. Typical bot exclusions are easier to deduce because we'll see a huge view spike on 1-2 days during a week, and much much lower viewcounts on the other days of the week, with no steady rise or fall around the high. That excluded Because the Internet from this week's list, for example. Also on the pro-bot-theory side, however, is the fact that the Amazon.com article on the French, German, and Spanish wikipedias (the only ones I checked) don't show the same variation in recent viewcounts as the English one. In comparison, the Indonesian wikipedia article on the Indonesian presidential election also showed a jump in views around that election similar to our article.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 05:23, 19 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indonesian presidential election: results are due 22 July, not 20 July. (1, 2) — Crisco 1492 (talk) 06:34, 19 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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