How this works
Sources & method
Y2DAY watches public Wikipedia attention for topics behaving unlike their own normal, then tries to establish what actually happened. Those are two different jobs, held apart everywhere on the site: attention is measured, an explanation is established from sources — or honestly withheld.
Wikipedia is the sensor, not the story
Every topic on Y2DAY arrives the same way: public Wikimedia pageview data shows unusual attention. That is a discovery signal. It says people are looking something up right now. It cannot say why, and Y2DAY never treats it as if it could.
What Y2DAY publishes as a story is a short, source-linked account of the real-world event that appears to explain the attention. It is not a summary of the Wikipedia article, not a report about a Wikipedia edit, and never a claim that an edit caused the traffic. A revision made after attention rose can corroborate an event; by itself it cannot explain what started the rise.
What the numbers mean
Topics are ranked by how far attention has moved from that topic’s own recent normal, not by raw popularity. When the site shows something like “4.2× its normal attention”, it is comparing the latest complete 24-hour window of views — assembled from the hourly data Wikimedia publishes — against the baseline Y2DAY computed from that topic’s own history, never against another topic. When part of that window hasn’t been published yet, the partial coverage is shown rather than papered over.
- A percentage on its own is never enough. A rise from 1 view to 3 is noise; a sustained rise from 100 to 300 can be real, because the extra volume is real too.
- Volume, baseline history, and language coverage all have to hold up before a topic is ranked at all. Where they don’t, the figure is marked as insufficient rather than printed as fact.
- Nothing here is live. Article figures describe the latest complete 24-hour window assembled from Wikimedia’s hourly releases; country figures remain daily. The dateline next to each number says exactly which window it covers.
Geography: a dark country is not a zero
Country-level attention comes from Wikimedia’s daily geographic pageview data, which is aggregated and privacy-protected upstream before Y2DAY receives it. Small counts are withheld at source to protect readers. So a country with no value on the map is a country Y2DAY has no publishable figure for — not a country where nobody read the article. Shading is relative within a single day, and the map is never described as live.
When Y2DAY cannot explain something
A real signal with no credible explanation stays labelled developing or unexplained, and it is not offered as a story. If several triggers are plausible, the uncertainty is shown rather than one being quietly chosen. If a published story stops meeting the evidence standard, it is corrected or withdrawn with a visible note instead of disappearing.
Where the material comes from
- Attention data: public Wikimedia Analytics pageview data, released under CC0.
- Article titles, descriptions and excerpts: Wikipedia contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and attributed wherever they appear.
- Images: Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Licences differ from file to file, so the credit recorded for a file is listed in the source line of the page that uses it.
- The map: country geometry from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain.
- Story verification: relevant public sources — primary records from agencies, courts, institutions or the participants themselves, and independent reporting with a named publisher and a traceable link. These establish what happened. They never influence ranking; discovery stays Wikimedia-only.