What do Laverne Cox, Crimea, and Malware have in common? Each was a top-viewed Wikipedia article for at least one day in 2014.
Nikhil Sonnad at Quartz created an interactive chart of 2014’s most-viewed Wikipedia articles on each day. Many make sense, capturing the zeitgeist of the day. Sports events and celebrity deaths dot the chart, as do major political events. Sonnad speculates on the high prevalence of software-related pages:
Some results are odd. Because the data measure pageviews and not unique visitors, they are subject to distortion from bots, or software that requests pages programatically. A software developer could accidentally write a bot that views a page tens of thousands of times instead of once. This helps explain the very large numbers of views for random pages like Malware and “Less (Unix),” as well as the entries for articles that don’t exist, such as “O. Gabriel”.
• The top-viewed Wikipedia page for every day of 2014 (Quartz)