One man's search for the least-viewed article on Wikipedia

Colin Morris, who has written a few Wikipedia articles that don't get many views, was interested in finding the least-viewed article on Wikipedia. He performed an interesting data analysis of Wikipedia articles, and learned that the least-viewed articles have two things about them: they have "little popular interest" and are unlikely to be chosen when you click Wikipedia's not-so-random "Random article" button.

Here's Morris's list of the 500 least-viewed Wikipedia articles in 2021. Here are the bottom ten. None of the articles had more than 5 views in 2021:

"The list is remarkably consistent in its subject matter," he says:

  • A significant majority of them are about species or other taxons of insects (plus 17 gastropods, and one fungus).
  • The next most common category is obscure geographical features, especially (for some reason) towns in Iran and Sri Lanka. My favourite of these is the deliciously laconic Kälberbuckel.
  • One other recurring genre are set index articles like C24H31FO5DottleySukmanovka, and Great polemonium. (A set index article is a page which looks and functions like a disambiguation page but isn't, because of reasons.)

Upshot: If you want to write the least popular article on Wikipedia, do one about a Sri Lankan moth.