Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-12-10/Traffic report

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• Must the Signpost continue to use this section to push POVs? "The mess George Lucas made of the prequels"... Not that I entirely disagree, but we should be more professional than that. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 13:13, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
  • That the Signpost has a point of view comes as a surprise to me, given the ever-changing group of people who write its content, and the inability of the editor-in-chief to impose any central point of view. More relevantly, the Signpost desperately needs writers. Objecting to what is simply one person's opinion (about the merits of a film director!), on a page where it's clear that the opinion is of a single person, seems to me to increase the likelihood that the Signpost will have even fewer writers in the future.
  • So: I applaud Milowent for his/her work here, and I (for one) fully support personal opinions being expressed here (with the standard caveats about sexism, racism, etc.) Rock on! -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:42, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
  • The objective data is made more interesting through the addition of some opinion. I don't see it as a problem, but consider this as a regular opinion column in the Signpost and just enjoy reading it. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 17:57, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
    • Then it should be labeled as an opinion column. When I wrote the FC section, I did my best to avoid showing a POV even on subjects which I found thoroughly distasteful. For interest pieces, I interviewed FC makers and allowed them to present their own experiences. This is not the gaming press, where any article without POV is not published. This is the press for a community of encyclopedia writers, and should thus be a bit more mature. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 12:24, 14 December 2014 (UTC)
  • So Milowent called he Star Wars prequels crap. How does harm anything? I seriously doubt anyone with an IQ above room temperature would cite this Signpost article as proof that those movies were crap, let alone that Wikipedia said they were crap -- unless this hypothetical person wanted to make some point dishonestly. -- llywrch (talk) 00:42, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
• Thanks for the commentary and support. The data is the data, but the notes are commentary; in formulating how these charts would look I considered the work of prior chroniclers of popular culture such as James D. Hart who wrote The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (1950) and Gerald Bordman's works on American theatre. That "unworthy" material is often popular is worth noting. Interestingly, the "mess" comment is a carryover from Serendipodous' report last week, though I also agreed with it, and no one commented on it. Commentary on the opinions expressed is always welcome and, to my mind, should this data be available to researchers in 100 years, they might actually find the lists and commentary useful. I didn't expect commentary on the Star Wars aside; I thought my choice of title "Dead Black Men ..." was perhaps very slightly provocative but I thought it the best way to really capture what was happening in terms of article popularity that week.--Milowent • ^hasspoken 14:13, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
  • I like the commentary and explication after the facts. Bearian (talk) 20:21, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
  • I also like the POV commentary in the traffic report. Note if you are refer to the top websites, I recently updated the top 100 according to Alexa so some items have changed in rank since last June. Frmorrison (talk) 18:58, 18 December 2014 (UTC)