After introducing my wiki wordcount script in this post I solicited for ideas of things to count. One great suggestion from Abbie was to do 'years'.
Here it is.
Here we have plotted year against 'number of characters in the wikipedia entry'. There are a couple of lines marked on the graph (I gave them fancy names because that's just the way I roll).
The dark, horizontal line is the 'Base Historical Interest' (BHI). Beyond a certain point (around 1850) 'normal people' stop being interested in what happened on a month by month basis in a certain year and so the articles are written by and for a vast minority (historians? those with family connections to a certain event?). The BHI level represents the amount of work that Wikipedians put into an average, uninteresting year. Most of the letters are actually in the form of the sidebar and headers, which my script does not yet automatically remove.
The light, diagonal line is the 'Linear Interest Growth' (LIG) trend. As we get closer and closer to the present day people become more involved with the subject and there is a corresponding increase in the amount of words that get written.
I find it really interesting that when something historically significant happens, the trend lifts itself from the LIG and we see an increase in wikipedia interest. I have labelled a few LIG-excess events here:
The mystery peak of 1903 is due to somebody having messed up the formatting on the 1903 wikipedia page so all the tags get counted in the wordcounter. Naturally after wikipedia was introduced (2001) the number of entries on the year page exploded as people began to add things in real-time.
late edit: I just ran the script all the way back to 1500. The results are here. With this extra data I'm beginning to think that an exponential may make for a better fit.
The point is moot really, as just like trying to observe an uncertain-electron, the act of using wikipedia as a measure of history has been affected by the existence of wikipedia itself, and any and all trends will have been smashed by 2001
late edit 2: Give me more ideas for things to count
Here it is.
Here we have plotted year against 'number of characters in the wikipedia entry'. There are a couple of lines marked on the graph (I gave them fancy names because that's just the way I roll).
The dark, horizontal line is the 'Base Historical Interest' (BHI). Beyond a certain point (around 1850) 'normal people' stop being interested in what happened on a month by month basis in a certain year and so the articles are written by and for a vast minority (historians? those with family connections to a certain event?). The BHI level represents the amount of work that Wikipedians put into an average, uninteresting year. Most of the letters are actually in the form of the sidebar and headers, which my script does not yet automatically remove.
The light, diagonal line is the 'Linear Interest Growth' (LIG) trend. As we get closer and closer to the present day people become more involved with the subject and there is a corresponding increase in the amount of words that get written.
I find it really interesting that when something historically significant happens, the trend lifts itself from the LIG and we see an increase in wikipedia interest. I have labelled a few LIG-excess events here:
The mystery peak of 1903 is due to somebody having messed up the formatting on the 1903 wikipedia page so all the tags get counted in the wordcounter. Naturally after wikipedia was introduced (2001) the number of entries on the year page exploded as people began to add things in real-time.
late edit: I just ran the script all the way back to 1500. The results are here. With this extra data I'm beginning to think that an exponential may make for a better fit.
The point is moot really, as just like trying to observe an uncertain-electron, the act of using wikipedia as a measure of history has been affected by the existence of wikipedia itself, and any and all trends will have been smashed by 2001
late edit 2: Give me more ideas for things to count
Labels: history, wikicounting, wikipedia
