Blog P.I.

One of the best homebrew Wikipedia tools around is the Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool maintained by a young Swede who goes by the name Henrik on Wikipedia. At least it was, until Henrik announced he was going on vacation in July and the statistics fell into quick disrepair. Many began clamoring for his return (including yours truly), and some concluded that he wasn’t coming back.

Luckily, this past week, he did. Whereas many Wikipedia editors announce that they will be on leave and then continue to edit, this guy took his vacation seriously. And from what I hear, the Europeans do take some long vacations.

So if you’ve never seen this tool, I thought I’d take this day of much discussion about Sarah Palin and Wikipedia to compare two snapshots of Henrik’s tool for the main Sarah Palin article. First, the chart for May. Each bar represents one day, and the number with each counts raw page views. So how many views is that?

35,563 total. Not bad — in fact, that’s more than twice number of page loads at Tim Pawlenty’s article that month. I am not, however, suggesting we start using this like a futures market; the tool is highly sensitive to news articles that will send droves to Google with a particular keyword in mind, and then many of them to Wikipedia. So how many visited Palin’s article in August?

Notice how you can’t see those bars almost at all until the spike at the end of the month? Some of those slivers toward the end are 14,000+ views. The biggest day was somewhere around 2.5 million, for a total of 4,220,407 views for the month. Barack Obama’s page received a relatively meager 1,377,462 page views for the entire month (if only this tool had existed when Obama announced in Feb. 2007) and John McCain’s page received an even smaller 988,944. And both presidential nominees received a significant boost that day and for a few thereafter. How about Joe Biden? Better than the top of each ticket, but still about half of his rival undercard. This proves nothing except that Sarah Palin’s entry into the race drew a tremendous amount of attention, but we already knew that.

Now that the tool is back, I will plan to make use of these charts every once in awhile. Close readers will wonder if this is the Wikipedia feature I hinted at a few months ago, and others may wonder if I’ve given up on writing All the Rage for this month. The answer to both is no, so hang tight. As to whether this blog is now simply about Wikipedia… the answer is I don’t think so.