Top 100 articles on Wikipedia: why are the counts so low? : Applied Statistics

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I am a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University and author of Bayesian Data Analysis (with John Carlin, Hal Stern, and Donald Rubin), Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (with Deborah Nolan), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (with Jennifer Hill), and, most recently, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (with David Park, Boris Shor, Joe Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina).

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Top 100 articles on Wikipedia: why are the counts so low?

Posted on: November 10, 2009 4:28 PM, by Andrew Gelman

From blog commenter Lemmus comes this list of the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages in 2009.

The thing that I find hard to believe is that the number of hits on most of these articles is so low. For example, if I google "World War II," the Wikipedia entry comes up first. But according to the list linked to here, there were only 30,000 visits to the World War II Wikipedia page in all of 2009. I have similar problems with the other numbers. Could they really be so small as all that? Or am I thinking about this all wrong?

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It's easy to miss, but on the first item of the list there is a note that the numbers are hits/day. That makes the 2009 total for World War II around 11 million.

Posted by: Blake Riley | November 10, 2009 4:51 PM

yeah, hits per day, during 2009, I guess.

Posted by: Greg Laden | November 10, 2009 5:05 PM

Aahhhh. In that case, the numbers are higher than I would've thought, but certainly believable. Lots of high-school kids writing reports, I guess.

Posted by: Andrew Gelman | November 10, 2009 5:41 PM