[sampo]

> Data and Methods

> Data for this story were collected and processed using the Wikipedia API. The period of collection was from July, 2015–May, 2019, from English Wikipedia. It was inspired in part by this map.

> Person/city associations were based on the thousands of “People from X city” pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic). We chose to include multiple occurrences for a single person because there is both no way to determine which is more accurate and people can “be from” multiple places.

[eesmith]

There is a flaw in their method.

Take for example Santa Fe, New Mexico. I expected the most Wikipediaed person would be George R. R. Martin.

Instead, it's Murray Gell-Mann.

Odd. I mean, yes, famous physicist, coiner of 'quark', etc. But, c'mon, compared to George R. R. Martin?

Then go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,... . While Gell-Mann is on that page, there are also seven subcategories.

  - Actors from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (2 C, 16 P)
  - Archbishops of Santa Fe‎ (12 P)
  - Artists from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (78 P)
  - Musicians from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (16 P)
  - Politicians from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (1 C, 26 P)
  - Sportspeople from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (11 P)
  - Writers from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎

GRRM is in that last subcategory.

However, it appears to be an uncommon pattern. I tried another 15 or so cities and none of them used subcategories.

[quacked]

Well, Gell-Mann just died, so it could be one of those "whoever is in the news more recently gets the most pageviews" effects.

Sort of like how any mildly funny post on a growing subreddit will become top/all time simply because a lot of people looked at it that day. The next day, there will be even more people to look at it, etc.

[eesmith]

"The period of collection was from July, 2015–May, 2019" and it seems unlikely that a one week bump due to Gell-Mann's recent death would be enough to change the balance.

I don't know how to get page view statistics from the Wikipedia API to double-check this.

[eesmith]

GRRM's page views far exceed that of Gell-Mann over the years. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or... .

There is no way the news of Gell-Mann's recent death could cause the balance to change that significantly. Over 8 million people would have needed to visit his page in a week, for a page which normally gets 9,000 views each month.

[quacked]

Wow, it's not even close.