Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Miscellaneous/Automated "Top Viewed Articles" list on main page

Random proposal ►◄ Miscellaneous  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Automated "Top Viewed Articles" list on main page

• Problem: "In the news" section on main page is good and curated, but a Top 5 or Top 10 list of most-viewed daily (weekly?) articles might more accurately reflect what people are searching for at any given time
• Proposed solution: Dedicated section on main page to show either "Top Viewed" or "Hot" articles, either ranked or unranked
• Who would benefit: The community
• More comments:
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: TheNewMinistry (talk) 21:14, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

• toolforge:topviews exists, if you weren't aware. I believe it would be possible to automate display of this for use in wikitext, in the same way that mw:Template:Graph:PageViews works, but the bigger problem are the false positives. Some communities that experience a lot of traffic like English Wikipedia regularly see these so-called false positives, so under no condition would you want to show them automatically because they could be wrong. I'm saying that as a safe assumption from my community experience, but the mobile app for instance has a "Top read" section, and it suffers from the same problems… just fewer complain because there aren't as many users of the app as there are of the website. So anyways, I think this proposal is valid, we'd just really need to pay mind to the false positives and how the communities will react to them. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:38, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

  Using Template:Graph:PageViews doesn't seem to automate "Top Viewed Articles" list on main page? This may require a new magicword or something to generate, or a new "Top read" extension or a script to update the mainpage with adminbot Shizhao (talk) 03:08, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

  The homepage of zhwiki has a "Top Viewed"（zh: 動態热门） section zh:Template:Uptrends, which is updated every day by an adminbot. Shizhao (talk) 03:14, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

  It is more like trending than top viewed. But I think trending is probably more useful anyway. Also, even if for cases like top view, there are no need to show concrete number of view nor is there need to calculate the view over the entire period of time, and it would also be desirable to exclude view by crawling bots. C933103 (talk) 00:33, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

  I meant that you could create a new template similar to mw:Template:Graph:PageViews that talks to the pageviews API, only in this case it's a different endpoint, and also a different kind of chart. There would be no bot involved at all; the template could make queries to the API directly. I believe this may even be possible now, so long as you're content with the chart options provided by mw:Extension:Graph (see the demos page). MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 03:32, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

  @MusikAnimal (WMF): The graph extension still doesn't allow the creation of links, IIRC. So, you could generate a list of the titles, but it wouldn't be very usable. --Yair rand (talk) 00:35, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

• Putting this on the main page of any arbitrary wiki is a local consensus needed issue. --Izno (talk) 22:16, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

  That aside, there is also the English WP Hot Articles bot that I think CommTech has worked on before. --Izno (talk) 22:17, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

• In the news section is not used everywhere. This is really up to local communities what they want to show on their main page. Stryn (talk) 10:24, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Voting

•  Support, but it would be more useful if it was also possible on a per topic basis as well as globally for the wiki (e.g., top viewed astronomy articles). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:19, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Bristledidiot (talk) 19:00, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support As proposer TheNewMinistry (talk) 22:31, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Shizhao (talk) 03:53, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support JopkeB (talk) 05:48, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Eoan Ermine (talk) 07:28, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Respublik (talk) 08:37, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Aca (talk) 13:11, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Plus per topic, as Mike Peel suggested — OwenBlacker (Talk) 22:54, 29 January 2022 (UTC) 
•  Support. Noon (talk) 01:00, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Agus Damanik (talk) 02:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support TheInternetGnome (talk) 08:08, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support daSupremo 04:20, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support But it's likely for the wiki admins to follow and change the main page preference. Thingofme (talk) 15:53, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Dave Braunschweig (talk) 22:33, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Daniel Case (talk) 22:47, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Alvanius (talk) 23:42, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Specter Koen (talk) 05:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support KingAntenor (talk) 06:37, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Jacob Gamaly (talk) 07:23, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support WikiAviator (talk) 15:46, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Rzuwig^► 12:18, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support - Darwin ^Ahoy! 20:48, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support ·addshore· ^{talk to me!} 22:54, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support —— Eric Liu_（Talk） 05:33, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Ayumu Ozaki (talk) 06:53, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support InterstateFive (talk) 20:30, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support — DaxServer (t · c) 20:54, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support — I like C933103's argument that "trending" may be a better term, and Mike Peel's suggestion that this would be useful for topics/categories. = paul2520 (talk) 15:02, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Tom Ja (talk) 18:41, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support 4nn1l2 (talk) 01:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)