Page view statistics

If you go to any Wikipedia article and click on "View History," you will see another link called "Page view statistics." This will get you to a page that shows how much traffic any given article is getting.

For instance, you click on the page view statistics link for Moby-Dick, which I swear I choose at random before I learned that today is Herman Melville's 194th birthday. Anyway, you will see from the picture on the right what this page looks like. On any given day Moby-Dick probably gets about 3,000 hits, but some days see definite spikes in traffic. June 23, 2013, for example, drew nearly three times as many visitors to the article as is normal. I don't know for sure why this happened, but it's probably because the article was featured on one of WP's main pages or in another prominent position. Another possibility is that millions of American high schoolers found out that Moby-Dick had just been assigned as reading for the next school year (though June 23 of this year was on a Sunday). This is supported by the page views of June 2012 and 2011, which also show spikes at the end of that month.

And oh look, in October 2012 Moby-Dick went, in a three-day span, from about 4,000 hits on the first day to 17,000 hits the next day to 195,000 on the third. I guess a lot of people are on Team Queequeg.