This month's report on previous month's traffic on Wikipedia has garnered over 2,500 page views on Examiner, for some reason.

Maybe it's the unsettling fact that the Wikipedia Main Page has experienced four straight months of decline in page views.

Well, the "Mathematical_descriptions_of_opacity" story is indeed strange.

http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Mathematica...ions_of_opacity

It's fairly frequent that some obscure, irrelevant article gets bumped like that. I've yet to hear any explanation for this sort of thing that makes sense, although it seems likely that some sort of automated process, likely doing something malicious, or at least devious.

The drop in main page views may just mean that people are getting to Wikipedia articles through methods other than passing by the main page, such as a direct google search for an article.

The same happened to one of the articles I wrote. I believe it was linked to from another site for a few days.

That's a really interesting article. Thank you for making it.

Any evidence to support that, or are you just guessing?

You're still a few million off from a spike of 5 million hits.



I agree that this is likely at least part of the explanation, and I noted in my news article that OVERALL Wikipedia site traffic remains steadily high.

It would appear that one individual or one bot is responsible for the activity on the Mathematical opacity article.

Now, how do we get massive templates into these articles, at the moment they start to take off?

You have to wonder why someone would do that, and from a single IP It's not like a DDOS, where the bandwidth consumed is someone else's! Also, it doesn't say in the synopsis, but did the bot just hit the same URL (one transaction) or did it pull down the whole page, images and all ...

Thanks. It was fun working on it. If you are interested in paradoxes, you may like this one too



Come on, a few million more, a few million less, who cares

What I meant was that the article I mentioned also have unexplained spikes in traffic.

I believe you fairly rationally explained it, though. That's not "unexplained".

Here's another scientist noticing the matter. I wonder if he read the Examiner article? I wonder if he knows about the discussion about it on the Wikitech-l mailing list? If only I weren't banned from Wikipedia, I could help inform him on this unsolved matter.

Edit: He found out about the opacity article traffic from this list.

This amount of traffic is probably a coding error in someone's bot, but we might never know.

And that brings up something else. As I keep trying to say, Wikipedia is now being edited and
massaged by so many bots, it's absurd. No one even knows how many bots there are, the only
list of them is miserably short and outdated.

I suspect that Wikipedia is, most of the time (at least 60% and probably more like 90%),
no longer read OR written by human beings. It is now a bot-playground.

I have asked experts on bot editing of WP, and even they have no idea who runs the bots,
who writes the bots, which of the users are bots, or even how many there are. No one tries to
keep track, and the WMF doesn't care---all they care about is keeping edit statistics cranked up,
so they can keep begging money from donors. The "community" responded....by writing bots that
generate junk articles and pointless format edits. The existing articles get worse and worse, and
new articles look like this and this and this. All generated by bots that scrape other websites.

NO ONE reads them, because such information is useful to no one who would come to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is turning into a "zombie encyclopedia". Soon, it will be like the Open Directory Project--
a "closed" project, edited and controlled only by a small group of totally insane basement-dwellers.

You say that Wikipedia is turning into a zombie encyclopedia. Tell me about your feelings.

If only I could find a cartoonist who can draw in Matt Groening's style. I'd commission a comic book
of Wikipedia's absurd "history" prior to 2008. Replete with lies to the press, lies on mailing lists,
backstabbing on IRC, Wales getting his knob sucked by women who want something from him,
Carolyn Doran being dragged away by the cops, Robot Sue Gardner destroying people with her
eye lasers, Erik Moeller hanging around a playground in a dirty overcoat, Gerard in bondage gear
running porn websites and berating people on foundation-l, etc.

One could make a whole series of comics about this stuff. Its every bit as stupid and unbelievable
as Futurama is, or the X-Men....

I rather enjoyed Cock-up-over-conspiracy's many "cartoons" on this very site -- mostly mere arrangements of freely-licensed images with speech or thought bubbles over the speaking characters. They were great.

Examples: