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While pageviews at first glance represent the amount of demand for content, when you explore them more deeply there are several biases with pageview data.
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| First |
pageviews tend to most directly respond to trending news, especially pop culture, where Wikimedia has a strong reader presence (esp. North America and Europe). This is because Wikipedia’s main source of new traffic is Google which is primarily used in Europe and North America. Moreover, the English and European-language bias of the internet means that most language Wikipedias won’t have as strong of a signal for demand as English language content |
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Second
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topics that don’t have an organic public attention (and thus Google search presence), may have smaller but more important ways of being relevant. For example, many topics are taught in classrooms, workshops or other academic environments. From a topics for impact perspective, an article that gets 100k pageviews a month on English Wikipedia because it’s a popular movie, may be much less strategic than working on a 5-10k pageview a month article that will forever be taught in medical school, or a 400 pageview a month article on a smaller language Wikipedia that is important for a high school curriculum. |
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Third
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Part of the reason why big language Wikipedias are trusted by readers is that they have a sense of completeness and connectedness to other topics: when you search for a topic, you can <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_rabbit_hole" target="_blank">“fall down the wiki rabbit hole”</a> and find other related reliable content. Therefore an important topic may not have a lot of pageviews because the important connected content is not yet available on the wiki and thus readers are not exploring the content. |
<a title="Photographer: RomaineCreator artwork: Michael Mandiberg, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Print_Wikipedia_Ghent_-_Looking_up_articles_(3).jpg"><img width="100%" alt="Print Wikipedia Ghent - Looking up articles (3)" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/be/Print_Wikipedia_Ghent_-_Looking_up_articles_%283%29.jpg/1024px-Print_Wikipedia_Ghent_-_Looking_up_articles_%283%29.jpg" /></a>
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