Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-07-04/Traffic report


 * About Oy vexit. The day after the UK vote on Brexit to "leave" the European Union (EU), the U.S. PBS News Hour reported the 2nd-most popular topic in Google Search by UK users was: "What is the EU?". It is fascinating to see how many people want to learn about something after the vote was held (after exit from the EU was decided), or to require a mandatory voting quorum to avoid "false consensus" of sham ballots. For such reasons, I have suggested the wp:RfA process to delay !votes for 4 days as a period of fact-finding debate and rebuttals before users start posting Support/Oppose, until days of discussion have been held first. Anyway, I hope the UK people who asked what-is-EU questions were not disappointed by the outcome of Brexit. What more could Wikipedians do to inform the populace? -Wikid77 (talk) 22:18, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Interesting points, Wikid77. On these Google search stories, I always hope the people searching are those who didn't vote, here being those assuming the "leave" side had little chance of succeeding.  But its hard to know.--Milowent • hasspoken  15:30, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm with Milowent on this. I gather the actual numbers making that search were consistent with the theory that a lot of adolescents and early teens wanted to know what had just happened. Especially if they'd heard that young voters had mostly gone the opposite way to their parents. As for RFA, discussing reasons to vote for or not to vote for someone without saying whether you would vote for or against them is an unhelpful complication that would be likely to make RFA even worse than it is.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  08:47, 11 July 2016 (UTC)