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Humour

Traffic report of weirdness

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By Barbara Page

Lowest quality high-popularity articles – Who is reading this stuff?

Writing humourous articles about Wikipedia is easy because a lot of things are pretty ridiculous. We're thinking of inane talk pages that contain 247 archived discussions of exactly what size an image should be or the message that appears right above the editing window when we try to add a picture of our cat to the cat article. If you don't believe the following pageview numbers, just check the edit histories themselves.

This report on stub traffic is probably generated every day. Since we don't know how to give attribution to a bot, we can all just blame the bot's keeper for the creation of this traffic report. We have done our best to explain the unexplainable. Our theory is this: Indians read Wikipedia in far greater numbers than readers from other English-speaking countries. We have concocted multiple theories. Maybe these articles are viewed because the subjects recently passed away died. Only a few articles mentioned the mortality of their topics. We have never heard of any of these people listed below except Jimmy Connors, but the bot made a mistake on that listing. We are anticipating a travel grant to attend Indian cricket games to research these and similar topics.

Last updated: 2018-02-06 03:24 (UTC)
Weekly page views as of: 2018-02-03

Rank Article Status Views Very Deep, insightful and scholarly critiques, notes. incredulous statements, and comments
1 Mel Metcalfe Stub 108,209 Those Germans again! They templated this page to tell us that their article is better. There are exactly 19 words in the lead. This is barely a stub and should be moved to the English or German Wiktionary.
2 Jason Sangha Stub 55,952 A Punjabi Jatt Sikh cricket player. Obviously he has a lot of fans. Just imagine a simultaneous convention of these folks at the same place and time as Wikimania 2018. The Wikimedia cricket team could play the Fans-of-Jason-Sangha team and surpass the number of viewers who watched the (US) superbowl. As impossible as this sounds, just remember the premise of this Signpost article-the impossible happens all the time.
3 Ihana Dhillon Stub 48,832 At least this Indian actress is backed up by eight references that prove she exists.
4 Tamil Rockers Stub 45,904 Half of the two references is from a spammy blog. Unfortunately the blog discussion is closed and you aren't able to leave comments. This anonymously-run company(?) seems to have filled the role of a type of film-Napster in the state of Tamil Nadu.
5 Kamlesh Nagarkoti Stub 42,499 Pick up some new SAT words from this article like subedar, and crores. My favorite reference is this:[1]
  1. ^ "'I sat inside the washroom when my bidding was on'". ESPNcricinfo. Retrieved 2018-02-09.
6 Justin Herwick Stub 41,628 The page view numbers have got to be wrong. There are 23 words in the lead. One theory is that his mom owns 25 laptops that continually refresh the page all day and all night long. He has one 2002 reference. He recently organized an undocumented Art and Feminism edit-a-thon but since no one learned to edit, they sat around eating pizza and installed a page-refreshing app on their desktop that helped build up the page view numbers.
7 Isabella Gomez Stub 40,893 This actress is probably astoundingly gorgeous. We are pretty sure that readers come to her page to see if they can lift an Commons image of her to put up in their locker at school. How can +40,000 people read this and not correct the grammar?
8 Ollolai Stub 39,399 This is absolutely impossible. I don't know exactly how many people live in this commune (which may mean city in Italian) but each of the 45 residents must also have 200 continuously looping laptops that refresh the page every half second. Bots have made half the edits to this stub and it is still there. Absolutely even MORE astounding is that this stub exists in the following language Wikipedias: Aragonese, Armenian, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chinese (Min Nan), Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German (those Germans again), Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Latin (who speaks this again?), Lombard, Malay, Neapolitan, Persian, Piedmontese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sardinian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Sicilian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tarantino, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Venetian, Volapük, Waray
9 Ishaan Khatter Stub 36,663 You remember him, right? He starred in Vaah! Life Ho Toh Aisi! in 2005. Two of the editors that helped edit this stub have since been blocked but their legacy lives on.
10 Jen Selter Stub 35,653 Look! We can cram the whole article in this little box:
"Jennifer Leigh "Jen" Selter (born August 8, 1993) is an American Internet celebrity and fitness model. She attracted significant media attention for her coming out at a young age, initially on the photo-sharing website Instagram." A direct reference and link to Instagram is provided that proves this.
11 Jimmy Connors Stub 35,224 This is not a stub but obviously the bot messed up. Maybe the bot 'wishes' it were a stub.
12 Richard Gregson Stub 33,770 What a yawner. Its been a stub since 2015 and he is known for being married to Natalie Wood and making a baby.
13 Hassa bint Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan Stub 33,079 Besides messing up the formatting of this table, this stub has no citations. She has a very long name and was married to an emir. She died unreferenced in 2015.
14 Trap music Stub 32,645 This disambiguation page gets a lot of looks. I haven't checked this out yet, but I think readers might be looking for a rapper.
15 Milly Shapiro Stub 31,336 Cute little theatre star. Still not sure why so many pageviews. Do this many readers follow the career of child stage stars? I don't think I want to know the answer.
16 "Hot Sex" Stub 31,253 This is not what you think or was hoping it would be. All 31,253 readers were all thinking the same thing as you are now.
17 Gully Boy Stub 31,241 A future Indian film starring a whole bunch of blue-linked people. I wonder how many pageviews they get?
18 Lists of deaths by year Stub 31,161 This article proves that no one has died before 1987. Based upon the Recent deaths article I can actually believe the pageviews of this list page, it really isn't a stub.
19 Aryaman Birla Stub 30,641 Indian cricket players have a lot of stubs.
20 Neelima Azeem Stub 30,325 Movie star with one reference.
21 UFC on Fox: Poirier vs. Gaethje Stub 29,047 Another article about something that hasn't happened yet. I can tell you that at least 29,000 people are really, really looking forward to this. It also contains a template that is three times longer than the article itself. The articles listed in the template no doubt lead to at least 300 other stubs on wrestling-and again, you should know this sport is NOT faked.
22 Pierre Aubameyang Stub 28,769 Finally! A popular soccer player. One reference but I think everyone in his family has an article. I checked the article on one of his kids – Suprise! not a stub. At least you would think his kids would be stubbier and have more pageviews.
23 Takeoff (rapper) Stub 27,769 We LOVE our rappers. Imagine this: What if this rapper was an Indian cricket player, had a summer home in the commune of Ollolai, had some kids who were professional soccer players who only played in one game, starred in an obscure film, died before 2002, and was married to an emir? The Foundation's servers would be so worked up over this stub they would explode.
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What exactly is this list? You introduction doesn't really explain much of anything that I can figure out. Is this the most-viewed stubs? Then why call it humor and why mock the subject of most of the articles? This seems to be one of the best ways to identify articles needing improvement. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 19:24, 20 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That is so nice of you to say. Thank you! EllenCT (talk) 06:57, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Let me spell it out for you:
Bots do funny things
I can't explain much of what I found either, that is the point
Yes, these are the most viewed stubs
I don't do 'mocking' and you've misinterpreted what is written
I might be the only editor on WP who thinks I might be funny. Someone called me silly today and that is a compliment.
Best Regards, Barbara (WVS)   23:02, 20 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Barb, I think you're hilarious, but not funny in other ways. EllenCT (talk) 06:57, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you? Barbara (WVS)  
Very welcome; thank you for noticing. We also worked on standard scores for WP:MOSTEDITED. EllenCT (talk) 17:04, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I might help out with America's Next Top Model (cycle 24) since those editors keep deleting me from the article. Barbara (WVS)   11:27, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Where is our list of role models? Who do you know who can help me keep an eye on a fork of Quarry query 1337? EllenCT (talk) 20:21, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It might be less obvious from the link in the column now that a new report came out, but it is exactly the machine-generated list of popular low-quality articles from 6 February. Plus humorous commentary. We at the Signpost staff do not have a sense of humor that we are aware of, but there are about 2 some people think Barbara does. ☆ Bri (talk) 22:35, 20 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
More like 2^3 people, at least who I know. It could easily be in ten digits. EllenCT (talk) 04:42, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For the next Signpost, you should do a collaboration with EEng. FlyingAce✈hello 15:52, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, he has been asked (begged) by me to contribute. I may just create a humour article as a redirect to his talkpage. Barbara   10:04, 24 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You want me to do a collaboration with EEng? EEng 16:12, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, he wants you to do a collaboration with EEng. EEng 23:43, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Is he easy to work with? EEng 01:08, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Probably not. Barbara   00:05, 4 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]



       

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