In search of 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! Some of what I consider to be my finest contributions to Wikipedia are lucky to get a couple of views per day, for example:

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.

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…

As a starting point, I grabbed 2021 pageview data for a random sample of about 32,000 Wikipedia articles. Maybe the properties of the least viewed articles in the sample will lead us to some heuristics we can use to narrow our search for the least viewed articles.

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