Michael Jackson

On June 25, only moments after rumours of the death of Michael Jackson had begun to spread, Wikipedia began to feel the impact of a shock wave of curiosity. According to Wikinews hoaxes started to spread, internet sites suffered from overload.

Wikimedia Foundation CTO Brion Vibber described how the Wikipedia servers had a hard time trying to cope with the demand (see also Domas Mituzas’ more technical explanation). Wikipedia’s tough time became a small newsworthy factoid by itself, reported by several mainstream media, like The New York Times and CNET.

A blog named The Wikipedian analyzed in The King of Wikipedia Traffic how even The New York Times struggled to get the numbers right. Most media settled on a peak visit of nearly a million viewers in the final hour of June 25. In fact the actual number is almost 25% higher, as people who asked for an article on ‘michael jackson’ or ‘Michael jackson’ were routed to the proper page as well, but were overlooked in stats as differences in upper and lower case lead to separate raw counts.

Wikipedia servers received 1.24 million requests for the English article about Michael Jackson in the first hour only, 8.68 million  in the first 24 hours, 14.4 million in the first 7 days.

Page views per hour per language

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Note how in the line chart above the Spanish cycle is hours behind the German/French cycles and very close to the English cycle. This shows that most views for the Spanish Wikipedia came from North and South America, much less from Spain.

Page views per language for first seven days

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Page views and their historic significance

Liam Wyatt (aka Witty Lama) just days ago gave a presentation with the brilliant title “Wikipedia The Endless Palimpsest” to celebrate his graduation in history (many congratulations Liam!). In this talk he explains how recent revisions of an article can be peeled off to reveal older layers, which are still meaningful for historians. Even graffiti applied by vandals can by its sheer informality convey meaningful information, just like historians learned a lot from graffiti on walls of classic Pompei. Likewise view patterns can tell future historians a lot about what was hot and what wasn’t in our times. Reason why these raw view data are meant to be preserved for a long time (see also similar analyses on Sarah Palin and the H1N1 Flu).

Page views per article for English Wikipedia for first seven days