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In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia (2022)
- charlieyu1 3y agoWikipedia mods are eager to remove articles that they claim to be not significant so the least viewed article will probably change a lot
- lessbergstein 3y agoMy article for Carrier_IQ was deleted as non-notable for obvious political reasons then recreated yaers later after the spin around the company had been settled. There may also be some intelligence community shenanigans. It's a great way to delete uncomfortable historic facts. Now it's just a funny little story about a rootkit with no specific political intrigue at all.
- lyu07282 3y agonot just that, just remember Donna Strickland they deleted her article because non-notable and then restored it after she won the Nobel Prize of physics... oops.
- andrybak 3y ago[dead]
- chimeracoder 3y ago> It's a great way to delete uncomfortable historic facts. Now it's just a funny little story about a rootkit with no specific political intrigue at all. That's not how I'd describe the page today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_IQ
- chadash 3y agoYes, but in my experience, this applies more to people than to some of the topics discussed in the article. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a city, town, village or hamlet in the US without a wikipedia page (as an example, take a look at Jack Wade, Alaska [1]), for example. And I don't imagine that rare moth species articles get taken down. But you have to have some kind of policy in place so that every individual on the planet doesn't have a wikipedia page. [1] On Google maps view, i can't maybe 8 houses there? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jack+Wade,+AK+99732/@64.1519419,-141.4630071,448a,35y,3.16t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x5149e998873be075:0x2f1a9ca47f03bf1b!8m2!3d64.1526072!4d-141.4604683!16s%2Fm%2F0480bm5?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jack+Wade,+AK+99732/@64.15.... But it's on wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Wade,_Alaska https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Wade,_Alaska
- thepangolino 3y ago[dead]
- bombcar 3y agoAt some point a long time ago someone imported all the US Census data into Wikipedia, creating a page for every town reported. It strikes me strange that those are considered "notable enough" mainly because they've been in Wikipedia long enough, but new articles have to fight. Petty bureaucrats can only show their power by saying no, if they say yes it's as if they weren't there.
- pertique 3y agoThe author actually brings this up in the article, and it seems that they are not likely to be deleted (baring vandalism due to their unique status being surfaced, I guess). Spoiler for the interested, and it could be an artifact of the dataset the author used, but one of the commonalities between the least viewed articles is that their subject matter falls into a category that isn't usually eligible for deletion under Wikipedia content guidelines.
- icepat 3y agoWell, finding and then publishing the name of the least viewed wikipedia article would then drive up the view count, nullifying the initial reason for the search!
- wkjagt 3y agoIt's like the observer effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
- icepat 3y agoThis is exactly what I had in mind when I was writing this! Except just observing it would not change it, publishing it would.
- gwern 3y agoHe's changed the stats by taking a look at the articles to verify things like disambig status, so you'd have to be quite careful how you did your analysis to ensure no reflexivity. Personally, I think the reflexivity is part of the fun if you do a followup analysis. For example, I recently scraped WP to find 'the first unused acronym on Wikipedia': https://gwern.net/tla https://gwern.net/tla - it turns out to be 'CQK', and I'm looking forward to checking back in 10 years or so to see if anyone wound up using 'CQK' for a company or something, precisely because I wrote it up. We'll see!
- medstrom 3y agoWhat was the initial reason then? I'm not following you. Is there a problem? TBF, he's analyzing a 2021 dataset, and that will of course not be affected.
- icepat 3y agoNo, I'm just making an observation that he will destroy the uniqueness of the object by talking about it.
- throw0101b 3y agoReminds me of Geoff Marshall's series of Least Used Stations on UK's Network Rail: * https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt4q5oaptyI9U2zddss8dm8srzuJj6nRz https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt4q5oaptyI9U2zddss8d... * https://www.youtube.com/@geofftech2 https://www.youtube.com/@geofftech2
- auto 3y agoWhat an incredibly pleasant channel/video, thanks for the link!
- beAbU 3y agoIn an attempt to help preserve the article's status as "least viewed", I will not read TFA and remain ignorant of this fact.
- chadash 3y agoIt is so fantastic that we have a single resource where I can find information on an unremarkable Peruvian moth, a random small town in Iran, or a type of reading material designed for Sunday reading in Victorian England. Before the advent of the internet this stuff wouldn’t be worth the paper it is published on. But now the cost of storing it in the cloud is effectively zero, so we get this amazing long tail of information that is just incredibly valuable. Thank you to the people who contribute and maintain this stuff! Edit: what would be really cool is if I could leave a note on a page saying "hey, I visited this page and I'm looking to connect with other people interested in the Peruvian Foovius Barivius Moth"... ping me
- cosmojg 3y agoFor as much as I love Wikipedia as it is, I yearn for a return to the days of their old inclusionist[1] policy. [1] https://gwern.net/inclusionism https://gwern.net/inclusionism
- qingcharles 3y agoI came across a huge article on some magazine marked for deletion the other day. The amount of work that had gone into the article was extensive, and it made me sad. While my little article about a small pile of sand in the middle of nowhere has ironically been translated into nine languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq
- xhkkffbf 3y agoI agree. Why throw away perfectly good work out of some bizarre idea about "notability?" What's notable now is now what will be notable in the future. Stop the destruction! End this dumb rule and make Wikipedia truly open to all.
- CYR1X 3y agoProbably because you exploit this. Do this a bunch in some what that leans towards whatever your agenda is and eventually one of those articles will get a bunch of hits and attention before anyone considers revising it.
- cabirum 3y agoCan we fetch say, 10 articles after the server-generated random number, and then choose a random article from that? Intuitively, this should even the selection chance, but the math evades me
- sillysaurusx 3y agoWe could take the HN route of keeping all wikipedia articles in memory at all times, then just take a random sample of the list. In an alternate universe where Lisp dominated, Wikipedia's random article button is in fact implemented this way.
- jprete 3y agoI’m shocked at the method for picking a random page. It’s guaranteed to produce permanent biases in the randomization and lots of path dependence in how individual articles’ chances change over time. Picking a random int from 1 to N is not rocket science. This makes me wonder if there isn’t some intentional weighting going on, e.g. certain favored pages get space in front of them cleared out so they’re more likely to pop up.
- stefan_ 3y agoIf they went to this much trouble it's presumably because selecting a random row is an actually slow operation for their database (and this is a pure gimmick feature so the weighting not being equal is irrelevant). MariaDB suggests that "ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1" involves a full table scan..
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoWorse yet, they have had to struggle with MySQL’s idiosyncrasies since at least 3.22. There will be a lot of leftovers from those grim times that used to be “real clever hacks” back in the day.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoHow would you do it given that you can't know ahead of time which articles have been deleted? If you pick a random int from 1 to N, there's a probability that you'd get a bad result. If the proportion of bad pages is greater than good pages (a not-unlikely hypothesis given spam) then repeatedly picking a random int from 1 to N will take a few rerolls. I agree that rerolling is probably a fine strategy, but it's not obvious that everyone would be willing to just trust probability like that. In fact, if you set up your own wiki with 99 bad pages and 1 good page, hitting the random article button won't work most of the time. You could of course pick a random number from 1 to M, where M is the number of valid articles. But that runs into the same problem of how do you map the 1-to-M number back to an actual article id? This method may be biased, but it's constant performance. (I still prefer just keeping all valid articles in memory and choosing a random one of those. There are only 7M as of October, so including the deleted pages, there's probably ~70M, which is on the same order as HN's total item count. Heck, even creating one file per valid article on disk and doing a random search with "find . -type f | shuf -n 1" probably wouldn't be terrible if you cache the result every few seconds, though that'd also be biased in its own way.)
- lucgagan 3y agoContributing to Wikipedia has become really not fun. Or maybe it never was. I tried writing an article about Playwright - perhaps the most common test automation tool these days. It first got rejected and now just has been sitting in review state for 3 months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Playwright_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Playwright_(software) It is highly demotivating to try to write a quality article for Wikipedia because someone can just reject your days of work in seconds and then leave it in draft forever.
- qingcharles 3y agoWTF. 4 month review backlog? Why is there even a review system at all? This isn't a legal journal, this is Wikipedia. Your article looks great. Playwright is a very notable piece of software, extensively used. I hate when things get mature and enshittify.
- denton-scratch 3y ago> Why is there even a review system at all? I don't create articles these days; it's too much like hard work. You used to be able to create an article by making a redlink wikilink somewhere, and then clicking it - that would take you to an editor. The new article would appear in mainspace. Do you have to "volunteer" to appear in mainspace? Are all new articles deemed to be "draft", and subject to review nowadays? Or are some users allowed to create new articles in mainspace, and others not? If so, what are the criteria?
- mmiyer 3y agoThe criteria for creating an article in mainspace is to have made 10 edits and have an account more than 4 days old.
- denton-scratch 3y agoThanks! That's a pretty low threshold to surmount. @lucgagan: you've done the time. Try editing a few articles - copyediting is enough. Then delete your draft, and create a new mainspace article.
- hrdwdmrbl 3y agoIncredible that even the least viewed 2021 articles are still really well done! One has a photo. They have 5 and 6 citations respectively. They both have multiple sections. As someone who was already impressed by Wikipedia, wow! Talk about toiling in obscurity
- sigmoid10 3y agoFun fact: There are no uninteresting articles on Wikipedia. I can even prove that mathematically. It's a proof by contradiction: Start with ranking all articles by their interestingness. Then order the list and look at the lowest values. There must be a least interesting article. But the very fact that this is the least interesting one in the entirety of Wikipedia makes it interesting. In the same way, I assume the least viewed articles in this blog post will have lost their status by now.
- ithkuil 3y ago:-) and surely enough there is a wikipedia page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
- madcaptenor 3y agoIn the interest of being pedantic, the article actually looks at the least viewed articles in 2021.
- sigmoid10 3y agoWhich part of the statement would that affect?
- boomboomsubban 3y ago>I assume the least viewed articles in this blog post will have lost their status by now. No matter how many views they get now, they would still be the least viewed article in the year 2021.
- sigmoid10 3y agoAnd neither was anything of that sort claimed.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
- clearbrian 3y agoSchrodingers Least Viewed Article....Just by observing it... it may change state :)
- nologic01 3y agoCame here to say the same, but using [Heisenberg's uncertainty principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle) instead :-)
- dmezzetti 3y agoIf you're interested in a dataset that can run vector search filtered by page views, there is a Wikipedia embeddings database available on the Hugging Face Hub. https://huggingface.co/NeuML/txtai-wikipedia https://huggingface.co/NeuML/txtai-wikipedia Example query. # Find wikipedia pages for a topic in the bottom 5th percentile of page views SELECT id, text, score, percentile FROM txtai WHERE similar('topic') AND percentile <= 0.05
- davidvaughan 3y agoThe writer suggests that a page about a moth is unlikely to provide an opportunity for pushing contentious views. The edits show there was disagreement earlier this year about the wingspan of the Scrobipalpula crustaria. Is it 11-13mm or 10-13mm? People feel strongly about these things.
- kevinsync 3y agoDefinitely not the least-viewed, but I've referenced "List of pasta" to make breathtakingly-lame jokes more than a few times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pasta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pasta
- aragonite 3y agoFor me one of the best kept secrets of Wikipedia is the Navboxes collapsed at the bottom of every article. They are very good for getting a bird's eye view of complicated topics and especially helpful for seeing how something fits within a complex hierarchy. Some of them are like minuature works of art that I'd want to hang up on my wall one day: https://imgur.com/gallery/ILp6TtA https://imgur.com/gallery/ILp6TtA I get why they have to be collapsed by default, but I use a userjs to move them to the top of the page, uncollapsed, so I can use them to navigate (I set their CSS zoom to 0.3 so they don't take up too much space)
- worik 3y agoI am interested that you find these attractive as "art". I cannot see it, not at all.
- hackernewds 3y agoI can as well.
- WaffleIronMaker 3y agoto me, reading these overviews is a very rewarding experience, as every article title in the category gives me a rewarding rush of memories and context all related to a common theme. and if I don't know about a topic, it's an effective way to find the gaps in my knowledge. maybe it's not a traditional form of art, but I can see how it's a unique way to interact with a large domain of content.
- NickHoff 3y agoASCII arrow: own work. LOL
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thesnide 3y agoI'm sure those least viewed ones will now quickly become the most viewed ones for some period of time... The power of slashdot/HN
- golemotron 3y agoPaging Dr. Heisenberg
- starkparker 3y ago> On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view. Hence articles about species and populated places are generally not deleted, even if the topic is only weakly sourced This is not why this happens on Wikipedia; sourcing is a factor, but notability derived from the nature and quality of the cited sources is the most commonly used criteria to delete articles. For example, Wikipedia once had a notability guideline that a person who completed in a sport at the international level was probably notable, so a weakly sourced article on, say, a footballer with a single international cap could be notable enough to avoid deletion. But then editors removed this guideline and fell back onto the general notability guideline (GNG), which is much stricter for people: substantial biographical coverage from reliable mainstream sources at the national level. Match reports don't count (too routine), no local interviews (too primary), no enthusiast publications (not reliable enough), etc. Of course, this meant that hundreds of stubs and dozens of full articles about women's international footballers would never meet GNG due to a relative lack of mainstream media coverage, even if they won a World Cup. So all it took was one editor to decide to do almost nothing but flag hundreds such articles since the opening of the Women's World Cup this summer, almost all of which were deleted. So it's not this reason that keeps moths and places: > On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view. But rather, very different standards of notability are why there are more low-traffic articles on items and places that can't sue Wikipedia editors for libel.
- ghaff 3y ago>reliable mainstream sources at the national level And does anyone actually believe this is applied consistently? I'm willing to bet that there are countless Wikipedia articles about people in technical, academic, local political, etc., etc. roles/positions that wouldn't meet that criterion.
- starkparker 3y agoNo Wikipedia policy is applied consistently. They're applied when editors want to apply them to justify a decision. That's how every individual decision on Wikipedia works; precedent doesn't even apply.
- dang 3y agoDiscussed at the time: In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524943 - May 2022 (68 comments)
- hn8305823 3y agoAm I going to get on a list for clicking on a few articles about random towns in Iran?
- chihuahua 3y agoNo, you're already on the same list for posting a comment that mentions that country.
- Andrew018 3y ago[dead]
- lloydatkinson 3y agoVery unexpected Cow Tools reference
- chs20 3y agoWhy does he need to subsample? Seems like it should be feasible to find the minimum of a 6M array
- IvanZagreb 3y agoI'd curious if there was a way to find Wikipedia categories with the largest amount of stubs, and if that might potentially be an indicator of topics that have the least amount of information on the site.
- brudgers 3y agoBut with 6 million plus articles 6.0e6 been a brute force number for decades. A linear search might have taken less time than reading the article. Almost certainly less time than writing it. It would not have been as entertaining, of course or as clever. Good engineering is like that nearly all the time.
- klyrs 3y agoAmusingly, one of the identified articles was vandalized soon after this article was published: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scrobipalpula_crustaria&diff=1176398116&oldid=1086879205 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scrobipalpula_cru...
- sobhhg 3y ago[flagged]
- ForOldHack 3y agoPlease try not to skew the results. Poke around with Archive.org plz.
- worik 3y agoInteresting. What about smallest number of views V, and word count C. What is smallest V/C?
- gcanyon 3y agoIt really doesn't matter, but why in the world would you do random page selection like that? Maybe that makes it super-easy from a SQL standpoint? But as demonstrated it does a terrible job of weighting pages evenly, when a tiny bit of code could make them completely equally likely. And further, there's good arguments that they shouldn't be equally likely. Instead, rank articles by size, or popularity, so people are more likely to see articles that are reasonably interesting and full of content.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gggdgg 3y ago[flagged]
- goodboyjojo 3y agoit's kinda sad that the least viewed articles are about moths. i really like moths they are like socially-awkward butterflies