Wikipedia has a daily list of the top 1000 pages from the previous day and I’ve always wanted to mess around with it. (I did make WikiPopPulse, but it was over a year ago when I barely knew what I was doing with JavaScript and it kind of sucks.) It’s interesting to see who’s popular generally, I suppose, but I’m more interested in who’s having a moment. What background names have been brought to the fore? What topics are we buzzing about?

For that you need a little more than just a top 1000 list. You need a little analysis. You also need some tools to work with the data you get. I spent the weekend playing around with this idea and I’m pleased to announce Wikipedia Hot Topics ( https://wikitwister.com/wht/ .)

Wikipedia Hot Topics analyzes the top 1000 Wikipedia pages for a given date, finds the ones which had a significant view bump against a 7-day median (more than 100%), then divides them into categories (living humans, deceased humans, films, even categories like “rare diseases”. The category information is being taken from Wikidata’s P31 “instance of” value.) Each Wikipedia article on the list gets a detail section with more information about the article along with link to external tools and resources. Let me show you how it works: as usual, Wikipedia Hot Topics is free-to-use, free of ads, and made for desktop.

WHT is easy to use. Use the date form to choose a date between January 1, 2016 and now. (It defaults to two days previous.) Then choose how many of the top 1000 pages you want to analyze. Doing 1000 will take a few moments so if you just want to try it out, knock a zero off. After you choose your date / number and click analyze, you’ll get a spinner briefly and then a list of available categories.

“Other” are all the category listings that had less than three entries. When you select a category from the dropdown menu, you’ll see a list of all the pages from that category. Click on a page and you’ll get a detail section next to the list:

The detail section provides some basic information about the topic and its recent page views, along with a link to the full Wikipedia page. But most of the information here is linked to external resources. You’ll find three things in this section:

External Links From Wikidata: WHT checks Wikidata for the presence of about 30 different properties — official Web site, Facebook account, RSS feed, Mastodon Instance, YouTube Channel, etc — related to this article and lists them here. Mostly external links are associated with people pages, but you’ll sometimes find them with other topics (movies have official Web pages, topics have Library of Congress authority IDs, etc.)

5 Highest Pageviews In Last 30 Days: This list will give you some context about the page view changes for this Wikipedia topic. Each of the dates is linked to a Google News search for that specific date. The search opens in a new tab.

Keyword-Based RSS Feeds: Each topic has keyword-based RSS feeds for Bing News, Google News, and Reddit. Any parenthetical string gets removed for the feed; “Joe Perry (musician)” becomes simply “Joe Perry.”