Coverage
What is included
WikiSignal listens to Wikimedia’s public recent-change stream. It keeps article creations and edits from Wikipedia domains.
- Bot-flagged changes are excluded before storage.
- Wikidata, Wiktionary, Commons, and other Wikimedia projects are excluded.
- Most rankings use the main article namespace, excluding talk, user, category, and administrative pages.
- Data is retained for 30 days, so the site is a recent-activity view rather than a historical archive.
Timing
Time and freshness
- Event time
- Bucketing uses the timestamp supplied by Wikimedia for when the change occurred, not the time WikiSignal processed it.
- Rolling window
- A window ending at the latest refresh. The rolling-minute and rolling-24-hour cards include the immediately preceding 60 seconds or 24 hours.
- Complete bucket
- A finished UTC minute or hour. Aggregate charts and rankings use complete buckets where a partial bucket would create a misleading drop. The article-detail chart is the exception and includes the current hour.
- Live
- The Home page’s “Live” indicator means its latest API refresh succeeded. It does not mean every panel includes the current partial minute or hour.
Glossary
Metric definitions
- Edit
- One accepted Wikipedia recent-change event of type “edit” or “new.”
- Editor
- One distinct non-empty editor identity in the stream. This can be an account name or Wikimedia’s identifier for an anonymous or temporary editor.
- New article
- A “new” event in the main article namespace. Recreated pages can also produce a new-page event.
- Content changed
- The sum of bytes added and bytes removed. It measures total movement, while net change is additions minus removals.
- Current size
- The size after the newest retained edit, not a fresh request to Wikipedia. It can differ from the article’s current size.
- Language
- The Wikipedia subdomain that produced the event. Codes such as “arc,” “ary,” and “arz” identify distinct Wikipedia editions.
Comparisons
Trends and baselines
“Expected” is the preceding baseline scaled to the length of the recent window. It is a comparison with that article’s own recent pace, not a forecast.
Example
If an article had 2 edits in the previous hour, its expected count for a 15-minute window is 0.5 edits.
- Pages gaining momentum ranks by the largest surplus of recent edits over expected edits, then by recent volume.
- Articles attracting editors applies the same idea to distinct editor identities.
- 48h baseline compares the last complete hour with the preceding 48 hours, normalized to one hour.
- Most changed is not a baseline comparison; it ranks total bytes added and removed.
- Language change compares the last 24 complete hours directly with the preceding 24 hours.
Interpretation
Limitations
- High edit volume can reflect constructive work, disputes, vandalism, or reverts; WikiSignal does not infer intent or quality.
- Distinct identities are not necessarily distinct people, and one person may edit anonymously or through multiple accounts.
- Article creation time is shown only when its creation event remains inside the article detail’s seven-day window.
- Upstream delays and reconnects can make the newest data arrive late even though its original event timestamp is preserved.