Most popular videos on Wikipedia, 2015

One of the big outstanding questions for many years with Wikipedia was the usage data of images. We had reasonably good data for article pageviews, but not for the usage of images – we had to come up with proxies like the number of times a page containing that image was loaded. This was good enough as it went, but didn’t (for example) count the usage of any files hotlinked elsewhere.

In 2015, we finally got the media-pageviews database up and running, which means we now have a year’s worth of data to look at. In December, someone produced an aggregated dataset of the year to date, covering video & audio files.

This lists some 540,000 files, viewed an aggregated total of 2,869 million times over about 340 days – equivalent to 3,080 million over a year. This covers use on Wikipedia, on other Wikimedia projects, and hotlinked by the web at large. (Note that while we’re historically mostly concerned with Wikipedia pageviews, almost all of these videos will be hosted on Commons.) The top thirty:

14436640 President Obama on Death of Osama bin Laden.ogv
10882048 Bombers of WW1.ogg
10675610 20090124 WeeklyAddress.ogv
10214121 Tanks of WWI.ogg
9922971 Robert J Flaherty – 1922 – Nanook Of The North (Nanuk El Esquimal).ogv
9272975 President Obama Makes a Statement on Iraq – 080714.ogg
7889086 Eurofighter 9803.ogg
7445910 SFP 186 – Flug ueber Berlin.ogv
7127611 Ward Cunningham, Inventor of the Wiki.webm
6870839 A11v 1092338.ogg
6865024 Ich bin ein Berliner Speech (June 26, 1963) John Fitzgerald Kennedy trimmed.theora.ogv
6759350 Editing Hoxne Hoard at the British Museum.ogv
6248188 Dubai’s Rapid Growth.ogv
6212227 Wikipedia Edit 2014.webm
6131081 Newman Laugh-O-Gram (1921).webm
6100278 Kennedy inauguration footage.ogg
5951903 Hiroshima Aftermath 1946 USAF Film.ogg
5902851 Wikimania – the Wikimentary.webm
5692587 Salt March.ogg
5679203 CITIZENFOUR (2014) trailer.webm
5534983 Reagan Space Shuttle Challenger Speech.ogv
5446316 Medical aspect, Hiroshima, Japan, 1946-03-23, 342-USAF-11034.ogv
5434404 Physical damage, blast effect, Hiroshima, 1946-03-13 ~ 1946-04-08, 342-USAF-11071.ogv
5232118 A Day with Thomas Edison (1922).webm
5168431 1965-02-08 Showdown in Vietnam.ogv
5090636 Moon transit of sun large.ogg
4996850 President Kennedy speech on the space effort at Rice University, September 12, 1962.ogg
4983430 Burj Dubai Evolution.ogv
4981183 Message to Scientology.ogv

(Full data is here; note that it’s a 17 MB TSV file)

It’s an interesting mix – and every one of the top 30 is a video, not an audio file. I’m not sure there’s a definite theme there – though “public domain history” does well – but it’d reward further investigation…

2 thoughts on “Most popular videos on Wikipedia, 2015”

  1. “Anglocentric public domain history”, perhaps?

    This is a really interesting list. Wikipedia is currently asking the public “what does Wikipedia mean to you”.

    As someone who once took a keen interest in how Wikipedia worked, this is very bittersweet. The community is amazing but i worry it burns people out, dealing with all the nonsense.

    I imagine the Obama speech gets many of its views by linking for news websites; could the others have been used similarly, to illustrate news stories cheaply?

  2. Andrew,
    I’ve been trying to connect with you because of a photo posted on Wikipedia Commons under your name. (At least I hope it’s you.) It’s the one of the railway in Solon. I’ve used it on the cover of a “scientific novel” about climate change entitled TRAIN WRECK EARTH, published by Climate Activists here in North Carolina, US. Of course I’ve credited it as required, but we’d like to send you a book. If you don’t mind sharing your address, use my email address above. Thanks.

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