Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-01-16/Traffic report

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• Hallelujah! Donald Trump is not on the list! Illustrating my isolation from current events I have no idea who Jeffrey Dahmer is. Is that a fault or a virtue? Smallchief (talk) 02:30, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

  I don't know that Dahmer could be categorized as "current events" by any metric, but I'd say you're definitely better off not knowing. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)^{Talk to Me!} 03:10, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

  @Smallchief: Very briefly, serial killer and cannibal from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Had a lot of films and such based on him recently. Some people have the hots for him, I couldn't tell you why. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 04:31, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

• Even though I read the monthly collection of lists, I always find these end-of-the-year lists surprising. I thought Ukraine, the World Cup or Elizabeth II would be #1 but instead we get a serial killer who died decades ago. TV series are way more important and influential than I thought. Any way, thanks for compiling this annual list, I find these stats interesting as we try to understand our readership better. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 04:37, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

  @Liz: There is the other thing, mind: A TV show might leave you hungry to find out the true facts; whereas retrospectives of Queen Elizabeth II were very common. If you've just read a lengthy BBC obituary, you might well feel knowledgable enough to not need Wikipedia as well; but if you've watched a fictionalisation, you might well want to know what's true. Adam Cuerden ^(talk)_{Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600^th FP!} 05:14, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

• I have to firmly disagree with @Igordebraga:'s conclusion "In short, shame on everyone who let this happen". So, if there'd been no article, no-one would have come, so you've wished shame on everyone who wrote the article. The article also took a fair amount of flack, vandalism and all that fun - and every editor who came to fix it added to the view count. So shame on them too. Even the underlying concept I dispute. If our article managed to provide some accurate data to people who were otherwise just interested in it, then it's done what we are here for - and helping the knowledge of individuals is why I, at least, am here on Wikipedia. So shame on them and shame on me, too. Nosebagbear (talk) 11:45, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Did I say anything about the article itself and everyone who mantains it? Providing good information on what the people seek is never a bad thing; I only wish that what drove the most viewers wasn't such a repellant subject, or that what is supposed to be a retrospective of what happened in the year opens with a terrible thing from decades ago (the war on Ukraine would at least be a terrible thing that was on the news). Ted Bundy was #3 in 2019 for both a documentary and a movie on Netflix (that like the Dahmer show seem middling, all three didn't even pass 60% on Rotten Tomatoes), but he was below the death list and the biggest movie of the year; things were even more offset for him being the start of three straight subjects of adaptations (right below were Freddie Mercury and Chernobyl). Paraphrasing what I wrote, my problem is not what we have an article on Jeffrey Dahmer, only that of all things it was the one that the most people wanted to read. igordebraga ≠ 17:42, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
    • igordebraga except if you use phrasing like "shame on everyone who let this happen", you do end up with the broadest interpretation (and I don't believe I've had to do any egregious abuses of the English language to make that concern). Nosebagbear (talk) 16:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
      • In any case, sorry if my choice of words ended up hitting who I didn't target (specially as editors cleaning what bad visitors leave are certainly a small drop in the traffic numbers compared to the droves of Netflix viewers). igordebraga ≠ 22:55, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Agreed. A lot of the write ups on this page are really subpar. It seems that several of the authors this year found a WP:SOAPBOX to express gripes and pet peeves. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:53, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

    Yeah, I was deeply unimpressed by the write-up on the Depp-Heard suit. —Compassionate727 ^(T·C) 03:00, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

    Agreed, you should have seen the traffic "reports" about Depp-Heard in the months during the trail, they were a soap box for a few disgrutled authors pushing their slant. On another note, Signpost templates are outdated and many articles do not render properly in mobile due to bad layout. Early in the year I had a half completed plan to modernize the templates and make the layout mobile friendly, but abandoned it after the blatant soap boxing in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-03-27/From the Signpost team (orginal version), you can see the talk page and the related spillovers to ANI and VPM for more context. The constant snide traffic "reports" about Cricket, IPL and Indian movie industry only gave me more reason not to help Signpost with anything in future. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 05:55, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

    • "This year"? Have you missed the rants against Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, Game of Thrones season 8, and various on Elon Musk and Trump? igordebraga ≠ 03:27, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

      With respect, I don't think it's relevant if this is unique to the 2022 report. WP:SOAPBOX applies to all namespaces, and that therefore includes the signpost and top 25 report. So there shouldn't be any rants at all. SSSB (talk) 19:28, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

      • I was just noting that long-winded and somewhat petty diatribes is nothing new. There's a Humor template at the top for a reason, it's not just handing out information but trying to make it fun to read (although it's clear that no matter if outside the mainspace even a hint of an opinion can be a minefield, as seen in the reaction to a small word choice in the editorial on the war linked above). igordebraga ≠ 22:55, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
      • SOAPBOX does NOT apply to Wikinews, of which Signpost is implicitly an extension of. Writers for Signpost editorialize in literally every single article in every issue. You appear to only object and attempt to invoke SOAPBOX here because you happen to disagree with the opinion. Axem Titanium (talk) 22:11, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
• Love the writeup for Diane, very akin to John Green's writing on the pizza Hawaii: "invented in 1962, in Canada by a Greek immigrant who was inspired by Chinese cuisine to put a South American food on an Italian dish." Of course, all the writing here is great, and I am extremely grateful to see this analysis on all these topics. Amazing work! ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 13:09, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
• Thanks for the mini-reviews of a couple of movies I'll take a look at: The Batman and The Northman. Smallchief (talk) 17:55, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
• I'm on the side that the diatribes are too long, but tastes will vary. I am not on the side that the high traffic counts for vulgarly controversial articles are much inflated by vandalism, checking for vandalism, and good faith edits. Is views per edit a ratio that is often compiled? Seems to me Wikipedia's page views will generally outnumber edits by something like a thousand to one, at least on the more popular pages. How many views are by editors including vandals? Ten or twenty for each edit? If so, the fact that the same articles about sensationalized topics get a storm of views and a storm of vandal hits, is probably not because conscientious editors have to check before and after we edit. Jim.henderson (talk) 19:29, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

• There are tools listing the most edited articles, and twice last year we added the month's leaders to the Traffic Report. It's not always that edits and views correlate, most of the time it happens when it's for an article that ends up getting lots of updates (including the ever-present death list), so I agree regular viewers must vastly outnumber the ones who also change the articles. No matter if there is at least one possible case, as when Andrew Tate's article first entered the weekly most viewed, it was noted to happen in the middle of an edit war possibly caused by his fans. igordebraga ≠ 20:52, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

• I do like the fact that "Page information" shows both reads and edits. For example, for the past 30 days, the Ukraine War article shows slightly fewer than a thousand reads per edit, on an "extended autoconfirmed protected" topic for which there are sharply contrasting public opinions even among English speakers. Perhaps the Traffic Report ought to include the edit count, or mention it for articles in which the ratio is unusually high or low, or some such thing. My guess is, for a fan edit war, the ratio will be unusually low. Jim.henderson (talk) 21:21, 19 January 2023 (UTC)