The data speak: Way more people want to know about Cambridge than Boston
Sure, Boston is an interesting place with lots of history and cool stuff, but is it, you know, Cambridge interesting?
By one measure, not even close – despite Cambridge being about 13 percent of Boston’s land mass, with about 17 percent of its population and three large institutions of higher education compared with Boston’s nearly 30.
The measure is Wikipedia’s article traffic statistics tool. The site, which describes the count as “easily susceptible to deliberate attacks and manipulations, but for most articles … should give a fair view of the number of views,” says the Cambridge page on the online encyclopedia gets more than twice the traffic of one about its far larger neighbor to the south.
That is, in the past 90 days (dating back to May 10) the Cambridge page has been looked at 94,072 times, with a peak of 1,723 views on May 12 and a bottom of 758 on June 13 (discarding an outage that took out data sitewide for all of July 23 and apparently for much of the next day, judging from uniformly truncated figures).
Meanwhile, the Boston page got 42,573 views in the past three months, peaking at 627 on May 13 and hitting a bottom of 343 on July 27. That total is less less than half of Cambridge’s total in the same period.
The Somerville page, by the way, got 25,541 in the three-month period, with a high of 429 on July 15 and a low of 182 on June 9.
As for Cambridge’s other neighbors, here’s a rundown of their pageviews in the past three months in descending order:
The Watertown page got 22,697. High: 602, on May 16. Low: 138, on June 29.
The Medford page got 19,972. High: 374, on July 15. Low: 133, on Aug. 4.
The Arlington page got 10,840. High: 213, on June 18. Low: 62, on Aug. 3.
The Belmont page got 9,887. High: 190, on June 15. Low: 61, on Aug. 4.
Heck yes! Cambridge is a beautiful city.
try again. boston, massachusetts is a dead page. after you search, you can click on blue link on the upper left corner. you’ll see boston gives over 5k hits, but boston, massachusetts with the 400 hits is a bad page in wikipedia.