Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page

Recently I noticed that Wikipedia's Pandeism page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism --  has been seeing record traffic. So much that five of its ten biggest days EVER have happened within just the past thirty days (including by far the single biggest day, the second being in December)



Wikipedia's Pandeism page has been around since 2013, and there are stats for how many times it has been viewed since around mid-2015.... and between 2015 and August of 2019, the most pageviews in a day was 618, in 2017. That number was beaten by about 50 on August 29, 2019.... And then on December 11, 2019, two days after Pandeism was mentioned in an article in Scientific American, the views were 901, a third higher than ever before. But in the past thirty days, there have been pageviews for the day of 533, 548, 618, 638, and 1227!!



The 1227 view day is 1/3 more than the December 11 record, and nearly doubles anything seen for over four years before that, and was itself surrounded by days higher than those usually seen in years before. And unlike the Scientific American episode, there's no clear reason.

For further context, the *average* pageviews per day for Wikipedia's Pandeism page for the period from mid-2015 up to a month ago (April 2020) are around 162-163. In that stretch, pageviews broke 500 only six times (and in fact, only even broke 400 eight times). Contra approximately the past 35 days, in which the daily average has been around 360 views per day, mightily pulled up by those five very high days (not to mention two other days breaking 400).

So I am really baffled and curious -- what is going on with Pandeism and consciousness of it that hundreds, perhaps thousands more people over the course of the past month or so have seen fit to visit Wikipedia's Pandeism page?

I wonder if perhaps the coronavirus situation has people seeking solutions in Pandeism....

Somebody even suggested to me that this could be the result of people not knowing how to spell "Pandemic" -- and you know, at first I took this as a joke, but now I’m thinking people really may well actually be typing in the p-a-n-d-e.... and get that far, and Pandeism pops up as an option, and they wonder, “well what is that?”



.... or perhaps the quarantine-bound are simply on the Internet more.

A mystery, and one I'd love to solve.

No comments: