Wikipedia Hot Topics has handed me a mystery.

The site takes one of Wikipedia’s daily top 1000 article lists and reorganizes it by recent increases in page views (as opposed to overall page views). The reordered list provides an overview from Wikipedia, page view information, links to date-bounded Google News searches for the page’s most-visited pages, and monitoring tools in the form of keyword-based RSS feeds.

I check WHT every couple of days so I can pretend I know what’s going on.

Today I was very surprised to see Dick York with a huge surge in views yesterday. He’s been gone since 1992 so I was confused. Normally I would click on one of the Google News searches and find out what the public interest was all about, but this time it didn’t work. He wasn’t in the news for that day — one throwaway mention.

Hmm! My next step was to look at Reddit, because Reddit can move a lot of traffic to Wikipedia outside the news. But no, didn’t see anything there either.

I went back to Google and did a web search for Dick York for the last 24 hours. I had to dig a little bit into the “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries” results, but there was a network of Facebook pages/groups posting a nostalgia item about Dick York’s last days.

Would that be enough to cause a 1500%+ in his Wikipedia page views? Not sure. It’s an interesting puzzle; I need to poke around a bit more.