V led 108 of 171 weeks. Jung Kook was read more in a typical one

Korean entertainment desks report fan votes the way sport reports form: in streaks. This week one BTS member was described as number one for a 131st consecutive week on one voting app, another as holding a weekly poll for a 220th time.

Those are counts of a thing people do — press a button, once a day, deliberately.

We hold a count of a different thing people do. Wikimedia publishes how many people opened each English Wikipedia article each day. Summed into 171 Monday-start weeks from June 2023, that says which of the seven members the world was actually looking up, week after week.

The two counts do not agree, and they do not agree in an instructive way.

One member led 108 weeks. Another has the higher ordinary week

V was read most in 108 of the 171 weeks, which is 63.2% of them, with a longest unbroken run of 27 weeks. Nobody else comes close on that column.

And Jung Kook’s median week is higher — 28,206 reads against V’s 26,527.

Both figures come from the same 171 weeks of the same data. Neither is a rounding artefact.

Why a member can lead more weeks and still sit lower in a normal one

A week’s top place is decided by that week’s peak. A median describes the week you would land on if you picked one at random.

A person whose reading arrives in occasional very large weeks will take the top place often, while the week you land on at random is unremarkable. A person whose reading is steadier can sit higher in that random week and still lose most of the weekly contests. The table above holds both shapes at once, and neither column is the real one.

The same split shows up further down. Jimin never led a single week, and his median week is higher than J-Hope’s, who led five. Fourth on one column, third on the other.

The four who never led a week are read tens of thousands of times in it

This is where a ranking without sizes misleads. Four of the seven have a zero in the weeks-led column. In a median week those four are read between 12,004 and 14,357 times.

The gap between the top of this table and the bottom is about 2.2 times on median reads. On weeks led it is 108 to nothing. A count that produces a zero has not found an absence; it has found that someone else was first.

The member in this week’s fan-vote report

The 131-week streak reported this week belongs to Jin. On our measure, Jin led 0 of these 171 weeks on the English Wikipedia, with a median week of 12,491 reads.

That is not a contradiction. Voting apps are where organised fan bases spend effort; page views are mostly where everyone else goes to find out who someone is. One person can be first in the first count for 131 straight weeks while never being first in the second, and both counts can be accurate about what they measure.

What we can say is narrower than a headline and more useful than one: these two yardsticks do not substitute for each other, and a streak in one implies nothing about the other.

We got the titles wrong twice before we got them right

The reason to trust the table above is that we do not trust our first version of it.

Our first pass typed the seven Wikipedia titles by hand. Two were wrong. RM came out at 184,204 reads because we had asked for RM (rapper); his article is RM (musician), at 2,130,446 — twelve times more. Suga came out at 354,555 under Suga (rapper); his article is Suga, at 2,046,562. A third was wrong in a subtler way: Jungkook is not the article at all but a redirect to Jung Kook, so the 4,089,795 we first counted was the redirect alone rather than the 5,766,465 the article and its redirects hold together.

Those corrections moved the findings twice. V’s longest run fell from 77 weeks to 27. Jung Kook’s weeks led rose from 34 to 58.

We noticed because two totals sat an order of magnitude below the rest of the group — not because a check caught it. The fix was to stop typing titles: we ask the Wikipedia API which article a name resolves to, then ask it for every redirect pointing at that article, and sum them. That is why the last column of the table exists. Jung Kook’s figure covers 22 titles; RM’s covers 10. A reader can see how much of each person’s reading we gathered before comparing any two rows.

The full table, the method and everything this measure cannot say are on the page behind this piece.