SUPER HITOPS - TOM BUCKHOLZ

Above, from BibliOdyssey posts:

A TIME TABLE from the book Mitchell’s New General Atlas, Containing Maps Of The Various Countries Of The World, Plans Of Cities, Etc., Embraced In Ninety-Three Quarto Maps, Forming A Series Of One Hundred and Forty-seven Maps and Plans, Together With Valuable Statistical Tables..’ by Samuel Augustus Mitchell Jr, 1883, from BibliOdyssey post Victorian Infographs.

Untitled scan from the book, London Town (1883), Designed and illustrated by Thos. Crane & Ellen Houghton, from BibliOdyssey post London Town.

Pasquin’s wind card[s] on the wind trade of the year 1720, from BibliOdyssey post, The Mirror of Folly

Uncredited illustration from a Hungarian geology book, from BibliOdyssey post, Splintered Remainders

Above, assorted drawings by E. T. Reed from BibliOdyssey post, A Twist of Reed

The Wikipedia article traffic statistics site lets you enter a term, select a month and year (formatted with “200902″ representing February, 2009), and view a graph of daily wikipedia page views for that subject.

I made the above animation using the page view statistics from January, 2008, through January, 2010, for the Wikipedia page on “full moon”. Each month is a frame, with one or two removed due to incomplete data. You can see that the spiked interest (”Wikibump”) in the full moon article is at its highest each month on the days that a full moon is happening.

Perhaps page views are lower for a full moon in a certain month because it was cloudy that night and fewer people noticed. Or higher the next month because the moon was full on Friday the 13th.

This graph for December 2009 is my favorite, and reflects the fact that we had 2 full moons in the month (on the 2nd and the 31st). If a month gives us two full moons, the second is known as a “blue moon”.

The page views for “blue moon” on Wikipedia rise from an average of three or four thousand throughout the greater portions of December ‘09 and January ‘10, with a peak of 181,200 the night of the blue moon — also the last night of the decade, New Year’s Eve.





Page views for each day of the selected month are listed at the tops of the bars. Unfortunately, relative bar height is not consistent across months, as seen in the changing notation on the far right edge of the graphs.

I found out about the Wikipedia article traffic statistics page from boingboing.net’s post, Wikibumps, in which guest blogger Andrea James investigates the site and catalogs a bunch of interesting examples of media events and current events sparking traffic jumps on certain Wiki pages.

On her above side-by-side comparison, Andrea writes, In some cases, the article achieves stasis at a higher level than it had before the wikibump. For instance, Kanye “Imma Let You Finish” West’s bump was 300,000. Taylor Swift’s was 250,000, but Taylor probably came out ahead, as she achieved stasis at more than twice Kanye’s views in December, the last full month of reporting.