sheets.works Data Viz

This page is a recurring data feature from sheets.works that turns Wikimedia’s daily page-view counts into a single world map. For every country it picks the one Wikipedia article that drew the most readers yesterday and labels it on the map, so the whole world’s curiosity fits on one screen.

The build is deliberately minimal. A ‘Play today’s Long Story Short’ link leads to a five-word news summary, while three buttons pick a country at random, surface one of the 25 countries whose top page rose furthest above its normal weekly baseline, or jump to a country whose spike has a stated reason. A search box and a ‘My country’ shortcut handle direct lookups, and the map can be downloaded.

Sources are stated plainly: page views come from the Wikimedia Foundation, borders from Natural Earth, and disputed areas are shown dotted. The daily refresh means the map is a snapshot of attention, not an archive, so it suits readers who want a morning conversation starter rather than a research dataset.

Use it as a quick scan before a news meeting, a classroom prompt about what different publics care about, or a starting point for a story when one country’s outlier page looks unusual. Treat the ‘reason’ lines as editorial context, not verified causation, and check Wikimedia’s raw counts if you need figures for publication.