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This essay, "Most-read articles in 2008" (or Most-viewed articles in 2008), is based on various Wikipedia article traffic statistics, gathered informally during the final months of 2008. Listed, in separate groups, are: the Top 1000 articles, then many of the top 10,000 articles, followed by scattered counts for other, various, popular articles (ranked below 10,000).
The top 1000 articles were trendy, for the year, with the "2008 Summer Olympics" (#4), plus those athletes (and prior Olympics) ranking very high. The word "wiki" (#6) is still viewed by millions, along with YouTube (#10), Facebook, and "Wikipedia" all higher than "Sex" (#20). Many blog websites and sexual words ranked in the top 500. Typical celebrities and the U.S. presidential-election candidates were also very high.
However, many traditional topics were still high ranking among the top 2,500 topics: Socrates #2118, Plato #1724, and Aristotle #1237, with William Shakespeare #458 and Physics #1386.
The following were the top 1000 after August (listing Rank, article & page-views). The data contains some errors, plus duplicates (such as "The Dark Knight" at both #16 & #57) and repeats some entries for upper/lowercase letters. Wikipedia pages (such as "Special:Search" & "Main Page") are also listed, so this is not a clean list, nor was it extensively analyzed. It's just 1000 high-count articles, as a rough-guess at popularity.
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The articles below were ranked lower than the Top 10,000 of the year, but many monthly readership counts (here for October 2008) are actually higher than for some articles ranked above 10,000. Discrepancies of rank are due to a lack of data, covering the entire year, rather than checking page-views after August, or just for October.
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The articles below were read less than 20,000 times per month, lower than above, but many still attracted wide readership. Articles read less than 50x times, per month, are somewhat questionable. However, Wikipedia bases notability on sources: if a topic appeared in mainstream media, but is read less than 20 times per month, that is acceptable. Notability is not tied to popularity of readers.
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Again, for the revisions of this essay in March 2009, the lists of articles were thrown together within just a few days, rather than the weeks or months needed to accurately rank the more than 10,000 articles, balanced across the whole year. The Top 2000 articles are especially skewed toward data from September 2008. However, the articles below 10,000 have monthly-count figures mainly from October 2008, rather than collecting data for all 366 days (leap year) during 2008, and dividing by 12 to calculate an "average" month.
Do not rely too heavily on the rank ordering of articles as shown in this essay. Rank figures are approximate for the year.