Wikimedia Commons is Wikipedia’s multimedia content store whose documents are completely royalty-free, which means that everyone can use them at zero cost. It turns out that during the last few months one of his millions of photos has been receiving an exaggerated number of visits per day.
It is the image of a violet daisy which is a variety of aster and that was photographed in 2014 by the Dutch Teun Spaans. The mystery with this photo begins to be noticeable the day June 29, date in which it receives more than 10 million visits. For no apparent reason the figures rose considerably to settle at a few 90 million daily visits. The reason? Nobody knew.
This is a violet daisy variety of aster
This is how he explained it on Twitter Chris Albon, Director of machine learning from the Wikimedia Foundation, even showing web analytics that demonstrate the inexplicable high. Also, add that they visit account for 20% of data requests from one of the main Wikipedia servers. A real pass.
Want to check it out yourself? The analytics are public.
2. Change the agent to “spider”
(h/t to @fdans for fixing my tweet) pic.twitter.com/y2ImBvlomN
— Chris Albon (@chrisalbon) February 8, 2021
The platform Phabricator, a contributor to Wikipedia, identified that this boom in visitors came from the India and his hypothesis was that some mobile app he was using the image on his splash screen thus giving those web traffic figures. They were not going wrong, although to get to know the truth they went through many phases.
Own Wikipedia forum was key to investigate the mystery. First, a user discovered that there was a health conglomerate in India it included ‘Aster’ (the type of flower in the picture) in its name. Others considered the hypothesis that the visits came from some famous online course and even that the main source was a developer question and answer forum.
While they were investigating the origin of this massive traffic and reviewing how it had increased over the days, they realized that in the June 29 the Indian government blocked a large number of applications created by Indian developers. The most popular of them, TikTok. The same day that visits began to skyrocket. Chance? Not at all.
What happened is that the users of these applications began to search orafter with the same or similar functionalities to replace them. It turns out that one of the TikTok clone apps uses the daisy image by linking the photo in its code. From one day to the next the users of this application skyrocketed causing the millionaire rise of visits in Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia team has confirmed that they have found the application although the image of the daisy is not seen anywhere. The name of the app has not transpired but they assure that they will keep us updated very soon. We’ll be alert.
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