Can Wikipedia predict box office success?

Pic by Fernando de Sousa

Wikipedia may be able to predict whether a movie will be successful or not. Researchers from Oxford University, the Central European University at Budapest, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics have published an article in the journal PLOS ONE saying that user activity before a film's release date will indicate its success. The more edits and more page views an article on a movie gets, the more likely it is to be a box office hit.

You can read the PLOS ONE article here. It has a lot of math, and footnotes, but that's to be expected in a scientific journal. All they really needed to put in there were a few cool images that helped to illustrate the article.

Article: Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data