Wow, I just got a serious reminder of the Power of Reddit.

I’m making a new tool to monitor breakout pages in specified Wikipedia categories as a new kind of topical information trap. One of the test categories I’m using is Androgynous people and that’s how I found out about an 18th/19th century preacher named Public Universal Friend.

PUF had a GREAT Wikipedia page view day yesterday, with a view count of 17265, which is a z-score of 5.9 compared to a 30-day median (5.9 is really high!) As far as I can tell, however, these page views weren’t precipitated by a news story but rather a /todayIlearned post about the Friend on Reddit which has since been deleted.

I love finding little oddities / rabbit holes like this as I’m making things (the Friend is a very interesting character!) but they can be WAY too time-consuming!