For a bit of fun, I calculated and plotted the most viewed people articles on Wikipedia by year of death. In other words, the most "popular" death in each of the past 122 years.
Results are shown on the releases page. An extended writeup is shown on my blog.
Python 3 (probably 3.6+), Wikipedia-API, Pandas, Seaborn (pip install seaborn). Install these with e.g. pip install wikipediaapi pandas seaborn.
The requests package is also needed but this gets installed by Wikipedia-API.
Edit download.py and find the line where the header for the requests to the
Wikipedia API is set. Uncomment the User-Agent field and set it to something
unique (the API will block requests without this header).
Run download.sh or download.py from Python. Wait many hours. Once finished,
run convertdata.py then plotbar.py.
Use download.sh (if on Linux) to re-run the download script if it exits with a
non-zero code. This is used to handle cases where requests to Wikipedia's API
time out. The downloaded data is cached for every 100 people.
Expected behaviour for when a page has had 0 views in the specified time period. See the pageview API docs.
These are defined in occupations.csv and are entirely subjective. I guessed
from scanning the headings of each person's Wikipedia article in cases where I
didn't know the person.
Sean Leavey
https://attackllama.com/