📊 Wikipedia Trending Topic Pageview Tracker

🚀 See which topics are gaining reader attention, not just which are popular. Compare pageview momentum across articles in one run.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-07-07 · 📊 8 fields per article · Built on Wikimedia's official Pageviews API (no key)

🎁 Try it free: the free Apify plan returns up to 10 results per run - enough to see the output quality. Any paid Apify plan unlocks full-size runs.

Give it a list of Wikipedia articles and it pulls daily pageview history for each, then compares this week's readership to last week's - so you know Taylor_Swift's attention is up 5.7x this week while Artificial_intelligence has cooled slightly, instead of just knowing both get a lot of traffic.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Journalists, content strategists, PR/comms teams, researchers, trend-watchers	Breaking-interest detection, content-calendar planning, PR spike monitoring, trend research

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📋 What this Actor does

• Fetches daily pageview history per article from Wikimedia's official REST API
• Splits the window into last-7-days vs prior-7-days
• Computes a momentum ratio and labels it SURGING / RISING / STEADY / DECLINING
• Reports peak single-day views and average daily views for context

💡 Why it matters: total traffic tells you a topic is known. Momentum tells you it's having a moment right now.

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🎬 Full demo

🚧 Video walkthrough coming soon - the Quick Start below takes under 3 minutes end to end.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
articles	string	(prefilled)	Comma-separated English Wikipedia article titles (underscores for spaces), up to 10
daysBack	integer	14	Days of history to analyze (14-60)

Example: Compare 5 trending topics

{ "articles": "Artificial_intelligence, Bitcoin, World_War_II, Olympic_Games, Taylor_Swift", "daysBack": 14 }

Example: Two-way comparison over a month

{ "articles": "ChatGPT, Generative_artificial_intelligence", "daysBack": 30 }

⚠️ Good to know: use exact Wikipedia URL-style titles with underscores (e.g. "World_War_II" not "World War 2"). Very recently created or renamed articles may not have pageview history yet.

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📊 Output

Each article returns 8 fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML, or consume via the Apify API.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
article	string	Taylor_Swift
totalViews	integer	1156272
avgDailyViews	number	82590.9
last7DaysViews / prior7DaysViews	integer	984174 / 172098
momentumRatio	number	5.72
trendLevel	string	SURGING
peakDayViews	integer	406328
generatedAt	string	2026-07-07T10:34:25Z

📦 Sample record

{"article":"Taylor_Swift","totalViews":1156272,"avgDailyViews":82590.9,"last7DaysViews":984174,"prior7DaysViews":172098,"momentumRatio":5.72,"trendLevel":"SURGING","peakDayViews":406328,"generatedAt":"2026-07-07T10:34:25Z"}

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🏆	Momentum, not just traffic. Ranks by week-over-week acceleration, not raw view count.
📚	Multi-article in one run. Compare up to 10 topics side by side.
⚡	Built on Wikimedia's official API. Free, no key - stable and durable.
🔁	Automatic retries. Transient failures retry with backoff.
💳	Pay per result. No subscription. A typical 5-article run costs about $0.035.

📊 Turns 5 manual pageview lookups into 1 ranked momentum table.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Setup
⭐ Wikipedia Trending Topic Pageview Tracker (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	Any article, up to 10 per run	Live per run	⚡ 2 min
Wikipedia's own pageviews tool	Free	One article at a time	Live	🐢 Manual, one by one
Google Trends	Free	Search interest, not pageviews	Live	🐢 Different metric entirely
Manual copy-paste	Free	Current session only	One-shot	🐢 Hours of clicking

Pick this Actor when you want a ranked, multi-article momentum view without writing scoring logic yourself.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free Apify account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Wikipedia Trending Topic Pageview Tracker page on the Apify Store.
3. ✏️ Set your input. List your articles - or just press Start, the prefilled example works.
4. 🚀 Run it. Watch results stream into the Dataset tab.
5. 📥 Download. Grab results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML - or pipe them anywhere via the Apify API.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

• Journalists/newsletter writers: find which topic is genuinely spiking in reader interest this week.
• PR/comms teams: quantify a spike in public attention after a campaign or news event.
• Content strategists: time a piece of content to a topic's real momentum, not a guess.
• Researchers: build reproducible public-attention datasets for media studies.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

• 🎓 Research & academia - media attention studies, information-diffusion research.
• 🎨 Personal & creative - track how a topic you write about is trending.
• 🤝 Non-profit & civic - monitor public awareness of a cause or issue over time.
• 🧪 Experimentation - prototype a public-interest dashboard on real data.

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🔌 Automating Wikipedia Trending Topic Pageview Tracker

Node.js (apify-client on NPM):

const { ApifyClient } = require('apify-client');
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('saint_person/wikipedia-trending-pageviews-tracker').call({ articles: "Artificial_intelligence, Bitcoin", daysBack: 14 });
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Python (apify-client on PyPI):

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient('YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN')
run = client.actor('saint_person/wikipedia-trending-pageviews-tracker').call(run_input={"articles": "Artificial_intelligence, Bitcoin", "daysBack": 14})
items = client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).list_items().items

📚 Full Apify API documentation

Apify Schedules triggers this Actor on any cron interval - weekly for a standing trend watch.

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🧠 Use via MCP (for AI agents)

Wikipedia Trending Topic Pageview Tracker is directly callable by any MCP-compatible AI agent (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and others) through Apify's hosted MCP server - no custom integration code needed.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/sse?actors=saint_person/wikipedia-trending-pageviews-tracker",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

Once connected, just ask your agent something like: "Use the Wikipedia Trending Pageview Tracker Actor to tell me which of these 5 topics is gaining the most reader attention this week."

📚 Apify MCP server docs

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this Actor

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

It calls Wikimedia's official Pageviews REST API per article, then splits the daily view history into last-7-days vs prior-7-days to compute a momentum ratio.

Why not just show total pageviews?

Total views conflate old, evergreen popularity with new spikes. Momentum tells you what's happening right now.

What counts as "SURGING"?

A momentum ratio of 1.5+ (this week's views are 50%+ higher than the prior week's).

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval.

⚖️ Is this data legal to collect?

This Actor only collects data that is publicly accessible via Wikimedia's free API. No login, no bypass of access controls.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs.

🔁 What happens if a run fails?

Transient errors retry automatically with backoff. If one article has no data (very new/renamed pages sometimes lack history), the rest of the run still completes and the log explains exactly why.

🆘 What if I need help?

Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

• Zapier
• Make
• n8n
• Google Sheets
• Slack
• Gmail
• Webhooks
• MCP

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🔗 Recommended Actors

Pairs well with HN Topic Momentum Tracker for comparing mainstream reader attention against developer-community buzz.

💡 Pro tip: browse the complete saint_person collection for more tools like this.

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🆘 Help & custom requests

• 🐛 Something not working? Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab.
• 🛠️ Need a custom feature or a different data source? Open an issue describing what you need.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available data is collected.