The flower started receiving millions of hits in the last months
(Wikimedia Commons / Reproduction)
Symphyotrichum novi-belgii. This is the scientific name of the flower whose image on Wikipedia had 90 million hits this week. According to the company’s machine learning director, Christian Albon, about 20% of accesses to the company’s servers Wikipedia that image came.
According to the website Pageviews.Toolforge page reached 174 million hits in a single day earlier this week. The reason? No one has found out yet.
The website Motherboard reports that the increase in access to the image started in July 2020 and comes from servers in Singapore. At the same time, TikTok was banned from India. In August, the image already received more than 75 million hits per day.
How transparent is Wikimedia?
Check out this actual, live ticket about an ongoing mystery. 20% of all requests to one of our data centers for media are for this image of a flower. Nobody knows why.https://t.co/IHrzpKGVbj pic.twitter.com/Cbw6pC9txd
— Chris Albon (@chrisalbon) February 8, 2021
The suspicion is that an application is driving traffic to the image of the flower at the base of Wikimedia.
One theory is that the photo of the flower is related to the covid-19 case tracking application used in India. Another is that the photo was used by the HiPi application, an alternative to TikTok.
But Wikipedia, a technology company that has lived on donations for more than 20 years, has not revealed the name of the app.
Get unlimited access to the best content of your day. Within minutes, you create your account and continue reading this article. Come on?
digital exam
R $ 9.90 / month
- Access wherever and whenever you want.
- Unlimited access to exclusive content on macroeconomics, markets, careers, entrepreneurship, technology and finance.
Sign it
digital + printed exam
R $ 29.90 / month
- Access wherever and whenever you want
- Unlimited access to exclusive content on macroeconomics, markets, careers, entrepreneurship, technology and finance.
- Monthly print edition.
- Free shipping
Sign it
4075489
