Will Smith — Chris Rock Slapping Incident
The 94th annual Academy Awards ceremony took place on March 27, 2022. The Academy Awards is an annual event that always seems to draw a big crowd consisting of all kinds of celebrities and whoever wants to tune in on TV. There are tons of awards presented to different films and actors/actresses, including best actor, best film, and many more. At this years’ ceremony, there was one major incident that overshadowed the whole thing and is now a major subject of controversy all over social media. Famed comedian and actor Chris Rock came on stage to present the award for the Best Documentary Feature. Rock then acknowledged Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who was sitting in the audience next to her husband. Rock made a joke about her bald head, which she has due to a medical condition called alopecia areata, which is a condition that causes hair loss and balding. Smith appeared to be laughing at the joke at first, but then the cameras showed Jada looking not too thrilled about the joke. A few seconds later, Will walked on stage and smacked Rock across the face. He then returned to his seat and yelled out “Keep my wife’s name out your mouth” ( there was a profanity in there but I will keep it censored). Rock was obviously shaken up a little bit, as he said “Wow. Will Smith just smacked me” (another profanity in there, will keep it censored again). The video of the slap immediately spread all around social media and people were wondering whether or not the whole thing was simply a staged act by two great actors. Will would later go onto to win the award for best actor for his role in King Richard, and in his speech he apologized to the Academy and colleagues but not specifically to Rock. He did issue an apology to Rock the following day on social media.
The slap definitely overshadowed the whole ceremony and there has been heavy debate around if it was staged or not. I think I found this topic interesting to write about because it is very recent and is something that most everyone is aware of. I will be using data from the Wikipedia article about this incident to see how the size of the article has changed over the past couple days really. Since the incident happened so recently, the Wikipedia page is still very new and has room for way more growth. But since the event is the talk of social media right now and has been for about a week now, the Wiki page will surely continue to get bigger and see more and more revisions. But I am curious to see the growth in the size even in the short period of time between when the article was created and now. See the chart below
As you can see, the article was created on March 28, and over a very short two-day span, the article size has increased astronomically. I think it is truly fascinating to see how something that happened so recently can just be exploding in popularity and this chart reflects that. The fact that after the first day the article size was already around 20,000 bytes is just crazy to me. And then 35,000 today. I am not sure if that is a typical growth rate for a new Wikipedia article, but it definitely seems higher than normal. I’d expect the line in this chart to keep on going toward the upper right corner. I think one thing that these findings reveal is that when people need quick information about something, they might feel inclined to find the Wikipedia article about it. Although Wikipedia does not have a reputation as being a super reliable source, it can be a good place to start to get really basic information about something. And when people google about this incident, the Wikipedia page is probably one of the first things they will see. The demand for information about this incident is very high, and as a result this page will be counted on to provide people with that information. This incident is a good example of demand for information driving people to make sure that information is available.