Most viewed articles on different-language Wikipedias

[undyingking]

http://toolserver.org/~johang/2012.html

Some of these are quite baffling.

• Why does a mountain in China dwarf all other Dutch pages, by a factor of nearly 12?
• Why is the page about the '@' symbol so popular in Spain? (Artefact of the analysis script?)
• Why are German-speakers so interested in cul-de-sacs?
• And why the obsession in France with an obscure

Comments

WCZ 1401.

[ron_broxted]

Isn't @ monkeys tail in Spanish?

Re: WCZ 1401.

[undyingking]

If so, that page doesn't mention it, although it does refer to it being called monkey's tail in other languages (German, Dutch, Romanian etc).

The unusual novel use of it in Spanish is to indicate neutral gender, ie. 'l@s' = 'los/las'. But not sure why people would need to refer to Wikipedia for that.

[venta]

I'm surprised, also, by the extent to which top hits are the name of the country. I've have thought Dutch speakers were above-averagely informed about Netherlands and wouldn't need to look it up. Unless they're all editing it :)

[undyingking]

Mm, or maybe to reassure themselves that other people haven't been editing it naughtily?

(I don't think I've ever looked up the UK on Wikipedia. What might I be missing out on?)

[mr_malk]

I'd guess that UK gets looked up partly because so few people know exactly which bits of the British Isles are actually included in it. Indeed, a poll of US citizens a few years ago found that although most of them knew what and (roughly) where the "UK" was, over 60% of those polled thought that the "United Kingdom" was in the Middle-East!

[undyingking]

Heh!

[thecesspit]

The top in Vietnamese is sex positions.

And One Direction appears far too often.

[undyingking]

That might also be a sex position, I suppose?

[mr_malk]

Tsk. People have put SO much work into that Optimus Prime page, and it doesn't even make the top 100?! Is there no justice?!

I'm actually mildly curious about just how little overlap there is between the stuff I look up, and the stuff that (apparently) everyone else looks up.

[undyingking]

There's probably a cute little comparator tool for that somewhere!

(Please don't tell me the Optimus Prime page is about sex positions as well.)