Buffalo Football on Wikipedia
Wikipedia is well known to be an expansive source of information for just about any topic one could think of, from a biography of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. to the history of the Shoup Boarding House (Those were actually the first two results that came up after I clicked on ‘random article’ twice). However, there is a lot more to be learned from Wikipedia beyond just the articles themselves. Examining wikidata such as article views, page edits and counts of unique editors, length of articles, and amount of hyperlinks, and many other factors allows one to gain an entirely new dimension of insight into Wikipedia and its changes over time.
The hiring of Deion Sanders, also known as Coach Prime, as the head coach for the Colorado Buffaloes football program in December 2022 made massive waves in the sports world, and brought massive attention to CU Boulder, the Buffaloes football team, and the City of Boulder as a whole. I decided to conduct a time series analysis of the data on the articles for Deion Sanders, the University of Colorado Boulder, the Colorado Buffaloes football team, and the City of Boulder to gain a quantitative understanding of how this national attention manifested itself on Wikipedia.
To no surprise, when I examined the page views for each of these articles over time, each article had a massive spike in views relative to the average amount of page views it previously received in late 2022 to early 2023. However, when analyzing this graph I noticed an interesting discrepancy between the articles for the City of Boulder and the University of Colorado from 2020 to present. The article for the City of Boulder saw an absolutely meteoric rise in Q1 of 2021, a roughly 30x increase that dies down just as fast as it spiked. I soon realized the corresponds to the time of the King Soopers shooting on March 22nd, 2021. The article for the University of Colorado also saw a large spike at this time, albeit nowhere in comparison to the level of the Boulder article. This made sense to me given the shooting was not related to campus, but I still found the rise interesting. The city of Boulder article again saw a relatively large spike around the time of the Marshall Fires in January 2022, despite the fires themselves happening in Superior and never touching Boulder, while the page for CU saw no such discernible rise. Finally, around the hiring of Deion Sanders , the article for CU saw its biggest spike yet, while the City of Boulder only saw a minor blip in the trend. I find it interesting how the article for CU saw a relative spike around the time of the shooting, as did the article for the City of Boulder around the time of the Marshall Fire, despite neither event actually being directly tied to the topic of the article.
After seeing these spikes in views and correlating them to real events that caused them, I decided to see if this trend in views was also accompanied by an upward trend in page edits. What I found was that although there was a spike in article edits for the City of Boulder accompanying the spike in views around the time of the shooting, there was actually a decline in monthly edits after the Marshall fire. The article actually saw it’s largest spike around September 2021. Conversely, the article for CU saw no discernible rise around the time of the shooting, but saw a spike following the Marshall Fires. As initially expected, there was a large rise in monthly edits from December 2022 to January 2023. What I found most interesting about these trends was the generally inverse relationship between page views and monthly edits following major events, as I would expect a higher volume of traffic on an article would also lead to a higher volume of edits.
Another aspect of the relationship between page views and edits that I found interesting when conducting this analysis of these 4 articles was that despite the absolutely massive discrepancy in page views (Deion Sanders’ page receives ~100x as many views as the page for the Colorado Buffaloes football team), each article had a total number of revisions in the low thousands, and Deion Sanders’s page only had about 3x as many edits as the Buffs page.
Ultimately, using and analyzing this data allowed me to gain a variety of insights on these topics, and added a new dimension to my understanding of Wikipedia and how it is used. I concluded that although national news events concerning Boulder like the King Soopers shooting, the Marshall Fires, and the hiring of Deion Sanders manifested themselves in the Wikidata through increased page views (an effect that extends to adjacent topics as well), this often did not necessarily correlate to an increase in article revisions. Overall my most interesting finding was that even after the spike in attention following the hiring of Coach Prime, the views for the Colorado Buffaloes football team article was still less than half of the average views for the University of Colorado Boulder page, and about 100x less than the views for Deion Sanders article itself.
