Wikipedia:Does Wikipedia traffic obey Zipf's law?

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This appears to be the case in practice for pages with rank between 5 and 1000, based on data from , as of September 2006.

The five most popular pages deviate significantly from the straight-line curve, but the approximation is pretty accurate from then on. The slope of this part of the log-log graph is approximately 1/2, suggesting that the hit rate is inversely proportional to the square root of the page rank,

Given that the actual unscaled hit rate of the page with rank six is about 100,000 hits per day, that suggests that the least popular page will get about 150 hits per day. In fact, though, it is common for stubs and articles about little-researched subjects to get fewer than 150 hits in a month.

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