How we can Look at Wikipedia and Wookieepedia to See What is Happening Within Star Wars and Which One You Should Use?
Star Wars has been around since 1977 with A New Hope by George Lucas released then. Since then, there have been eight other main series movies and three other anthology movies, one of which is animated, with more movies on the way. There has also been a lot of television series that have been animated or live-action since 1985, most recently being the third season of The Mandalorian, and there are still a lot more coming. There have also been plenty of books and comics about Star Wars going back to 1977. It is fair to say that Star Wars is a very large franchise.
With Star Wars being as big as it is, there is bound to be a lot about it online. Wikipedia is a great resource to learn about some Star Wars stuff. There is also a Star Wars only wiki page called Wookieepedia. This wiki goes in-depth about every little thing there is with Star Wars from different ships and where they have appeared, to the differences in characters from Star Wars Legends, everything made prior to Lucasfilm being bought by Disney, to the current Star Wars Cannon. When looking at these two resources it is important to know which one to use. However, we also should look at which one is being used more often and how much they get updated, especially with the releases of new shows, and announcements of new projects.
To start we can look at page view data from Wikipedia from just the main Star Wars page on Wikipedia. When looking at this line chart, there are a few general big spikes that can be seen throughout the timeline from January 1, 2016, to April 7, 2023. All these spikes go along with the release of a major Star Wars project, with the first one being Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens. Each spike after that keeps going along with a major release. The second spike was the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the third going along with the release of Star Wars Episode 8: The Last Jedi, and so on (annotations in the chart with the rest). We can see then how this goes along with a new show, The Mandalorian, and a character from that show, Grogu. When these pages get added, we can see how they were affected by The Mandalorian releases with the first spike of The Mandalorian being with season one, then the second with Season 2, and there is a current steep spike starting with the recent release of Season 3. This can also be seen with Grogu/Baby Yoda. As soon as his name was revealed, he had a large spike and he started off getting a lot of views. There is one caveat with Grogu’s page, that being prior to his name being revealed he was known as Baby Yoda, and without that page is available, I am not able to get data for it as far as I am aware.
Another metric we can look at is page revisions in Wikipedia and Wookieepedia. When looking at the data split up between the different pages, Star Wars, The Mandalorian, and Grogu, there are some things that pop up. The first thing that can be seen in this is how there are similar spikes within the revision charts as there were in the page views. The spikes with the revision can be accounted for with new stuff being announced or a new series being released for the first time that doesn’t have too much information about it. This can be seen in the leftmost chart, the general Star Wars page, where the spikes line up with the release of Disney+ and all the shows on there. Another thing is that Wikipedia tends to get more revisions per day on average with the big stuff like the Star Wars and Mandalorian pages. However, when looking at the Grogu page, Wikipedia only had more revisions per day for about a year, and then Wookieepedia seems to have more revisions. This might be an example of how Wookieepedia is better to use when it comes to the more specific parts of Star Wars, but Wikipedia is better for more general parts.
Looking more closely into this, I got more page revision data, this time from Darth Bane, Moff Gideon, Paz Vizsla, and Darksaber. When looking at these charts, it is very clear that Wookieepedia has a lot more information about more specific parts of Star Wars than Wikipedia and should be used when looking at more specific areas. However, if you want to find out information about a specific series or movie, Wikipedia would be the better way to go.
*All charts with revisions are made with a 365-day rolling average and all charts with page views are made with a 90-day rolling average.
