Page views as indicator of war

As discussed in last week's post, Wikipedia is good at indicating whether or not a film will be a success (more on that later). Can it predict military campaigns?

Check out Syria's page view statistics. In the past week, the number of people looking at the page has skyrocketed from 5,000 views a day to nearly 90,000. In the coming days it will probably jump a lot higher if the US launches a missile strike against that country. Now, a lot of these views are probably due to media attention or from the Syria article being displayed on the Main Page, but don't you think it's possible that among those 90,000 views are a bunch of military people looking for targets?

Or are they consulting Intellipedia?

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

Page views and stock market performance

An interesting article from Wired.co.uk from May. Can you tell if a company's stock is going to plummet by looking at the volume of page views for that company's article?

Wikipedia page views could predict stock market changes

Independence Day (1996 film)

As I suspected, more people tend to view the article for the 1996 film Independence Day around early July. The page view statistics, which I talked about a few posts ago, indicate that the article on the film gets huge spikes in traffic around July 4 and July 5. Interestingly, for both 2012 and 2013, more people viewed the article on July 5 than on July 4.

What could the reasons for this be? Too busy at a family cookout on the Fourth to be browsing the Internet? Too busy setting up illegal fireworks to bother researching the sordid production history of ID4? I'm picturing a scenario where hundreds of Americans with patriotic hangovers are suddenly reminded (while taking down there bunting) that there was a film where the White House got blown up, prompting them to rush to their computers for the maximum Roland Emmerich experience.

Page view statistics

If you go to any Wikipedia article and click on "View History," you will see another link called "Page view statistics." This will get you to a page that shows how much traffic any given article is getting.

For instance, you click on the page view statistics link for Moby-Dick, which I swear I choose at random before I learned that today is Herman Melville's 194th birthday. Anyway, you will see from the picture on the right what this page looks like. On any given day Moby-Dick probably gets about 3,000 hits, but some days see definite spikes in traffic. June 23, 2013, for example, drew nearly three times as many visitors to the article as is normal. I don't know for sure why this happened, but it's probably because the article was featured on one of WP's main pages or in another prominent position. Another possibility is that millions of American high schoolers found out that Moby-Dick had just been assigned as reading for the next school year (though June 23 of this year was on a Sunday). This is supported by the page views of June 2012 and 2011, which also show spikes at the end of that month.

And oh look, in October 2012 Moby-Dick went, in a three-day span, from about 4,000 hits on the first day to 17,000 hits the next day to 195,000 on the third. I guess a lot of people are on Team Queequeg.