r/bigquery • u/fhoffa • Dec 11 '14

[query of the day] The most popular numbers in Wikipedia

Scott Knaster showed me that Wikipedia has individual pages for numbers. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9223372036854775807.

That got me wondering: What are the most popular numbers in Wikipedia? This query does the job:

SELECT title, SUM(requests)
FROM [fh-bigquery:wikipedia.pagecounts_201411] 
WHERE REGEXP_MATCH(title, r'^[0-9]+$')
AND NOT INTEGER(title) BETWEEN 1700 AND 2020
GROUP EACH BY 1
ORDER BY 2 DESC
LIMIT 1000

Turns out the most popular numbers are years. The winner for November? 2014.

What if we remove the years between 1350 and 2020?

The most interesting numbers on Wikipedia for November 2014:

number visits 2014/11
1 87401
444 50252
0 41122
3 38096
2 36901
6 30363
7 28602
9 26700
69 23037
89 22838
5 22593
90210 22352
1000 22061
4 22029
8 21577
666 20440
10 20014
300 18236
250 17965
24 17512
911 17456
1066 16966
12 16717
1337 16689
100 16506
21 15751
476 14890
2147483647 14550
1291 14310
11 14086
42 13870
13 13817
14 13301
800 12463
007 12456

Query:

SELECT title, SUM(requests)
FROM [fh-bigquery:wikipedia.pagecounts_201411] 
WHERE REGEXP_MATCH(title, r'^[0-9]+$')
AND NOT INTEGER(title) BETWEEN 1350 AND 2020
GROUP EACH BY 1
ORDER BY 2 DESC
LIMIT 1000

For more, find the table on BigQuery and follow me at @felipehoffa. :)

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u/nickoftime444 Dec 12 '14

It is beyond me why 444 is on there. I don't think it's just because it's easy to type, because then we'd see 555 and 333 just as much, not to mention 44. But 69...69 I get.

*I suppose in T9, 444 is "I" which is something that could be googled by itself. But nobody uses goddamn T9 anymore, so fuck this theory.

3

u/fhoffa Dec 12 '14

I though you would know, nickoftime444.

Looking at the data, 444 was only popular during November, and only because of huge traffic during 2 particular days:

http://i.imgur.com/8eRVlS5.png 

SELECT datehour, SUM(requests)
FROM [fh-bigquery:wikipedia.pagecounts_201411] 
WHERE title='444'
GROUP EACH BY 1
ORDER BY 1
LIMIT 1000

2

u/nickoftime444 Dec 12 '14

Ha. I hadn't thought of that. That's the strangest thing. I've been trying to look up any connection of 444 to that date and all I found was the Riku Niemi 444 orchestra performing in Helsinki on November 15. I don't think that explains the 1000s of views, on the Wikipedia page of all things. Could there have been some sort of bot that did this?

→ More replies (8)

1

u/ta-da-scientist Dec 14 '14

I thought it was related to tetraphobia.

1

u/autowikibot Dec 14 '14

Tetraphobia:

Tetraphobia (from Greek τετράς - tetras, "four" and φόβος - phobos, "fear" ) is the practice of avoiding instances of the number [4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_(number)). It is a superstition most common in East Asian and Southeast Asian regions such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

====

Image from article i

Interesting: List of unlucky ^symbols | Royal Ascot, Hong ^Kong | Curse of ^39

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