it’s pretty amazing as she was hardly known until August 28 or 29 so to be #2 for the month that article must have had a HUGE amount of traffic in just the final few days of the month.” I agree.

Sarah Palin's page views on English Wikipedia in August 2008

I thought i would be neat to plot the rising of Sarah’s star on a hour-per-hour basis,
from a few days before till a few days after the announcement.

Note:The public announcement by McCain was first mentioned on his Wikipedia page at 15:12 GMT/UTC, and at 15:21 on Wikinews. Given the speed with which Wikipedia usually reacts that places the announcement in Dayton, Ohio around 15:10 GMT or 11:10 AM Eastern (GMT-4).

The filtered page request logs are available here. Note that these are page requests: some url’s lead to a “Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name

Disclaimer: in total I found 4,746,102 page views on the English Wikipedia in August, which is 153,100 avg. per day. This is significantly above Melancholie’s figure of 120,616 avg. Even when I discount misspellings and image pages I still get 15% more than he does. We will have to compare our counting criteria. This will take a while to sort out.

Broader perspective

We have seen before how Wikipedia visitor counts can alert us of breaking news:

An earlier example of how a major world event became instantly visible in our traffic stats was on April 19, 2005 when “Habemus Papam” was declared in Rome, signaling that cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from now on was pope Benedict XVI.


“You can clearly see a spike at 17 UTC when the new pope was elected” (Jakob Voss).

Matthias Schindler also mentioned that same example in his talk in Alexandria, but then went further by posing the question “Can we get a better understanding of what is happening in the world right now just by looking at our request numbers?” and illustrating that with the following diagram (pdf):


Wikipedia view counts for Democratic candidates from 10 Dec 07 till 4 Jan 08 (Mathias Schindler)

How intriguing. Yet I want to emphasize that any inferences from these view stats should be made with caution, especially in the last chart when the period is rather small for the subject at hand: the chart may reflect day to day news events rather than (or mixed with) long term popularity trends.

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