Here’s the opening few paragraphs of Colin Morris’s post as he tried to find the least viewed article on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty of room for articles about topics which are profoundly obscure, even downright boring. I should know, I’ve written dozens of them!
[…]
Of my creations, the least popular seems to be Sunday reading periodical, an article about a Victorian magazine genre which averages around a dozen views per month.
Are there articles with even less popular appeal than that?
Though Wikipedia page view data is publicly available (as a massive raw data dump, and through an API), there’s unfortunately no easy way to sort out the least viewed pages, short of a very slow linear search for the needle in the haystack…
It’s a great exploration into data viz and general data analysis. One of the main takeaways is that insect species pages and articles on geolocations tend to get the least overall which makes sense given how niche they can be.