Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-05/Traffic report

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Indian subjects

Clearly Indian-related subjects in English Wikipedia are getting increasingly greater number of visitors. Particularly Bollywood is proving its force even in English. But how does this translate into visits of the same subjects in say Hindi Wikipedia. Is Hindi Wikipedia developing fast enough to cater for this increasing influx of viewers from India and other parts of the world regarding Indian subjects? Just curious. werldwayd (talk) 12:54, 6 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

One factor to keep in mind is that not everyone in India speaks Hindi. Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil all have speaking populations larger than Great Britain, and even "Hindi" includes several sub-languages that are not always mutually intelligible. If Wikipedia is to be believed, then English, at 125 million, is India's second language, with as much as 50% the number of Hindi speakers, depending on how one defines "Hindi". That also makes India the second-largest English-speaking nation in the world after the United States. Serendi ^pod ous 13:15, 6 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

One week a trend does not make. Indian subjects are not garnering an increased presence on Wikipedia overall in any way: rather, a number of prominent Indian topics peaked in the news recently, and that audience flexed its collective muscle and brought those topics to the top of the viewcount. Put another way, for the purposes of illustration: if Barrack Obama experiences a (say) 30% increase flux in traffic and makes this list, does that mean that interest in the entire United States, as a topic, has increased? Of course not.

The data here is not a demonstration of a trend per se so much as it is a demonstration of another lesser but nevertheless interesting fact: that high-production Bollywood films can carry view hits just as well as high-production Hollywood ones. ResMar 18:28, 6 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid you're wrong; not about Bollywood rivalling Hollywood- that's correct, but this has been going on for years, not weeks. In fact, the last eight or nine months, when Indian topics have been in remission, has been the exception, not the rule. That the English language Wikipedia would be dominated by the world's first- and second-largest English-speaking populations (the US and India) makes perfect sense. What's surprising is that it has taken this long to happen. Serendi ^pod ous 18:37, 6 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Judging topical traffic off of a weekly top-ten list is like measuring Wikipedia traffic by extrapolating from main page hits: an appealing but meaningless shorthand. Top ten hits, though interesting from a causal perspective, are borderline statistical noise.

For measurements of long-term trends I suggest looking at popular pages data. ResMar 22:39, 6 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We also have a top 25, and we do an annual list as well. The trends that occur in the top 25 are pretty well represented in the year-end list. Serendi ^pod ous 23:51, 6 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I concur with Serendipodous that in the 2.5 years this chart has been kept, I subjectively feel that Indian topics (particularly pop culture) are showing increased relative popularity. Certainly if Mario or anyone wants to do a more rigorous analysis of this hypothesis using the WP:5000 they are strongly encouraged to do so. I suspect it could be worthy of publication if done right, based on some of the research we see published using viewcount statistics. I would also hazard to guess that the English wikipedia is getting the most attention. An article like Bajrangi Bhaijaan is currently much more comprehensive in English than its Hindi or Urdu versions. --Milowent • ^hasspoken 05:48, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]