Thursday 28 August 2008

Wikipedia Trends


Photo by blmurch

I found out about this new project this morning, though I can't remember at all where I read about it so I can't link back to it, sorry... (Might have been an SEO blog, I was quickly browsing through a few I didn't know about this morning).

Anyhoo, check out http://stats.grok.se

It's a pretty cool idea, you can check through traffic stats for specific Wikipedia articles, month by month. Look at trends from one article to another. For example, the Barack Obama article was viewed 1,350,292 times in June, with a huge surge on the 4th June, also matched in Google Trends for June. I think it coincides with the religious stories with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, though I'm not sure that explains it. Comparatively, the thimble article was only viewed 4,424 times, probably a relief to find out people are more interested in the American presidential candidate - apart for the thimble enthusiasts, maybe.

It started to make thing about whether clients monitor the articles concerning their brands or anything related at all. I know some do for sure, but others don't. Just checking through, I noticed a couple of brands we work for at iris that don't have any presence. Even if there are probably a limited amount of people interested in finding out more about Utterly Butterly, they may be disappointed to find out there is no information available about it on Wikipedia.

Given Wikipedia is one of the main points of reference for any internet user, I think it's important for brands and products to be present, and it could also be an additional point of presence (for traffic/awareness) for digital campaigns - keeping within Wikipedia neutrality rules and guidelines, of course.

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