Wikipedia rules. I use it dozens of times a week to patch decades-old holes in my understanding of the world or to get context around the news.
Wikipedia + Launchbar = Information at Your Fingertips.
Accessing Wikipedia is greatly facilitated thanks to LaunchBar. As if a king, I get to invoke vast chunks of human knowledge with just four keystrokes: [cmd-space]wp[space], plus a search term like, say, Scientology.
[Here is that search template if you want to add it to LaunchBar: "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=*"]
But Wikipedia does not yet answer a juicy meta-question: Who else is curious about this topic? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see how worldwide interest in topics like Islam, Intelligent Design or Louis Armstrong wax and wane as the events of the world unfold? This is the type of insight into what is on everyone’s mind, hitherto available only to the lucky few with access to search engine logs.
Wikipedia already has the raw ingredients of an amazing meme tracking tool: tons of traffic, tons of content, the ability to capture usage statistics. They need only a little chopping and sauteeing.
Here is a vision to steal for Wikipedia: Show how much interest this topic has garnered historically.
We’d like to be able to see, at a glance:
- How much traffic has this article been getting?
- What is the popularity trend? Spiking? Declining? Flat? Over the short and long term?
- How much editing activity has it been receiving?
- How does it rank among all searches?
I’ll leave it to as a design research topic to play out how this might look. (Feel free to forward mockups my way.)
A couple of other requirements:
- The data would likely have to be normalized against the growth of general Wikipedia traffic so as not to confound the message.
- We’d want this information to be available proactively (without clicking) but without interferering with the content of the article.
- It’d be nice to be able to drill in deeper to discover the next level of information such as where in the world do people care about a given topic?
[What other interesting types of questions could be gleaned from analyzing Wikipedia traffic?]
Also: wouldn’t it also be nice to have a set of robust APIs, so researchers could go wild analyzing the cause and effect of human curiosity over time and geography? Software architects: how might you build such APIs and hook up a scalable traffic monitoring system to the open source MediaWiki (the technological foundation of Wikipedia)?
See also
- Google Zeitgeist, a form of meme tracker, scrubbed for your protection, that carries the fascinating message that pop culture is really popular. (And that I’m really out of touch with it.)
- Wikipedia statistics (such as they are)
- Overture keyword searching – enter keywords, see how popular they are with search engines today. (Then contrive ways to pepper your articles with the most popular phrases like “sharon stone” or “britney spears sculpture” or daylight savings”, in order to attract hits.)
- Google Trends is interesting. It lets you look up any search phrase, see its popularity over time and what geographies are most into it. The Colbert Report searches are bigger in Canada than in the USA. Digg is on the rise. Searching for Sex is especially popular in Islamic countries. [Update 5/16/06]
