top wikipedia articles sent by librarians since 2004

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Mon, 2008-05-26 15:19

Since 2004, librarians on L-net have shared over 3,000 different articles from Wikipedia with patrons. Wikipedia actually has over 2 million English-language articles, so 3,000 isn't that many. Wikipedia is still the number one source our librarians use (just ahead of multcolib.org, the website for the biggest public library in the state).

The most-sent articles are:

Rank	Page	Count
#10	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin	8
#10	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China	8
#10	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun	8
#4	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot	9
#4	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_V%C3%A1squez_de_Coronado	9
#4	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_washington	9
#4	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot	9
#4	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson	9
#4	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_gama	9
#2	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan	14
#2	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road	14
#1	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_columbus	15

I ran this report once before, over a year ago, and I'm noticing that either I did this query differently, or we're leaking data. Twins, Cotton Mather, and the bombing of Dresden all should be on this list based on last year's numbers. Please, please, don't let it be leaking data. I think it's only a few duplicate and practice transcripts that got cleaned up.

On the plus side, it's great to see Bigfoot on this list.