Trending indicator
Trending indicators flag Wikipedia articles that experienced a higher volume of page views, edits, or both during the previous day. Increases in activity relative to other pages often correlate with current events. For that reason, this signal is useful to communicate the timely relevance of articles and to highlight Wikipedia as a source of up-to-date information.
Data sources
This section identifies where and how the data behind this signal can be obtained. It points to the relevant Wikimedia APIs, datasets, or metadata fields that reusers can rely on to implement the signal accurately and consistently.
Wikimedia Attribution API Beta Recommended
The Wikimedia Attribution API returns trending information about Wikipedia artciles through a trending object. To receive this signal, include the trust_and_relevance category in the expand parameter. The trending object includes a top and relative trending indicators. top indicates whether a Wikipedia article ranked among the project’s most read, most edited, or both over the last 24 hours. relative indicates whether the page is currently outperforming its average read and edit rates. relative trending is not yet implemented and will currently only return false for all relative trending values.
Reference documentation can be found in any wiki's REST API sandbox, such as the REST API sandbox on English Wikipedia →
Share feedback on this beta API →
Wikimedia Analytics API
The Wikimedia Analytics API can be used to retrieve daily top trending information about pages on any Wikimedia project. It allows obtaining a list of the 1000 most-viewed pages, or the 100 most-edited pages by number of edits.
See the Wikimedia Analytics API documentation →
Implementation guidance
Minimum requirements
This attribute is intended to accompany content extracted from Wikipedia articles. It will reflect significant, recent spikes in page views and/or edits relative to typical activity, often influenced by live events.
The trending indicator signal should be displayed adjacent to the title or summary of the reused article. It must not replace or obscure essential attribution signals.
Best practices
- Trending indicators have daily decays that make sources stop trending once article activity normalizes. We recommend respecting the default deactivation behavior to reduce accuracy risks.
Reuse scenarios
Search
Recommended
Trending tags help readers spot results experiencing spikes in attention and being actively updated in accordance with current events.
AI assistants
Recommended
Marking articles as trending signals that the information is being actively updated or consulted due to its relevance in relation to current events.