(Thanks, Mike Love!)

There’s something scary-fascinating about this visualization of the 100 most viewed pages on the English version of Wikipedia – a glimpse into the id of the Web: masturbation, pornography, youtube, wiki, adolph hitler, oral sex, death, united kingdom…

This paper investigates how the 100 most viewed and thus ‘most popular’ pages on the English version of Wikipedia stay the same or change over the five-month period of September 2006 to January 2007. This paper aims to show how information visualization can be used to gain quick insights into the overlap structure and topical relationships between the monthly most visited Wikipedia pages. For example, the visualizations will help you see that a much smaller percentage of the popular Wikipedia pages is related to typical encyclopedic topics, such as geography, history or politics, than you would expect.