WikiShark: An Online Tool for Analyzing Wikipedia Traffic and Trends

Abstract

Wikipedia is a major source of information utilized by internet users around the globe for fact-checking and access to general, encyclopedic information. For researchers, it offers an unprecedented opportunity to measure how societies respond to events and how our collective perception of the world evolves over time and in response to events. Wikipedia use and the reading patterns of its users reflect our collective interests and the way they are expressed in our search for information – whether as part of fleeting, zeitgeist-fed trends or long-term – on most every topic, from personal to business, through political, health-related, academic and scientific. In a very real sense, events are defined by how we interpret them and how they affect our perception of the context in which they occurred, rendering Wikipedia invaluable for understanding events and their context. This paper introduces WikiShark (www.wikishark.com) – an online tool that allows researchers to analyze Wikipedia traffic and trends quickly and effectively, by (1) instantly querying pageview traffic data; (2) comparing traffic across articles; (3) surfacing and analyzing trending topics; and (4) easily leveraging findings for use in their own research.