Ocean Acidification: What does Wikipedia have to say about it?
Known as the ‘evil twin’ of climate change, ocean acidification (OA) is a phenomenon where the oceans are becoming increasingly acidic. This acidity is due to the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the oceans, and the eventual creation of carbonic acid which lowers seawater pH. Ocean acidification is a hot topic in the scientific community as well as in policy. It is well established that this is driven largely by anthropogenic climate change and serious environmental consequences will result by the end of the century if nothing is to be done about the issue.
In 2015–2016, there was a global mass bleaching event, with the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia facing severe bleaching and loss of life. Coral bleaching is a side effect of OA, and a number of other disturbing environmental factors such as shifts in temperature and other environmental perturbations. The threat of OA on coral ecosystems is important because of the ecosystem services that coral ecosystems provide, which mainly are biodiversity, shore protection, food security, and economic benefit from the shellfish industries and the tourism industry. Globally, coastal communities especially are at higher risk to the ecological and economic shocks occurring due to OA.
To investigate how the public is reacting to this phenomenon and the reaction to the mass bleaching event of the GBR, the analytics for the Wikipedia pages ‘Ocean Acidification’ and the ‘Great Barrier Reef’ were analyzed over time. To gauge public interest in this topic, the page views and number of unique revisions were obtained from 2015 onwards. As a preliminary hypothesis, it would be expected that there could be a possible uptick in interactions with the two pages after the mass bleaching event.
For the ‘Ocean Acidification’ Wikipedia page’s unique revisions by month, there is a pretty variable trend, averaging close to zero from 2005 onward. In 2023 there is a large spike, so to examine this jump, just the 2023 months were plotted (January, February, March, and the beginning of April). It appears that in February 2023 there was a large increase in the user revisions. The page views were also plotted from 2015 onward. It shows a general decreasing trend, with variations with a notable peak at the end of 2022. Looking at the page views for just 2023, it shows a general uptick in the trend, with quite a lot of variance. Notably, larger spikes occurred in late March, around March 27.
For the ‘Great Barrier Reef’ Wikipedia page, the revisions over time (starting from 2002 onward) show a large increase in 2004/2005 and decreasing back to a lower, more stable level from ~2011 onward. There appears to be a constant trend, with some variation, from 2011 onward. The page views for the GBR wiki page is generally decreasing with a spike in late 2016.
Now let’s look at the two trends together on the same plot to compare, with the blue lines being the OA data while the orange lines correspond to the GBR data. The revisions for the OA wiki page tends to be increasing while the GBR wiki page tends to be decreasing with time. The page views for the OA wiki page are, on average, lower than the GBR wiki page. Both the OA and GBR wiki pages show a generally slightly decreasing trend for page views. The one notable outlier within the data is the jump in page views for the GBR wiki page at the end of 2016. Specifically for the GBR, the most detrimental bleaching occurred in March and April 2016. This could potentially indicate that this event sparked some interest in views of the GBR Wikipedia page. More revisions tended to be made for the OA page more recently than the GBR wiki page.
Conclusions that we can draw from this preliminary research is that the ocean acidification wiki page tends to be on average more popular than the GBR wiki page, based off of page views alone, over time. There was a significant jump in page views for the GBR wiki page in late 2016, which could have been a result of the coral bleaching event. Based on the unique revisions, we see that over time, the OA wiki page has become more edited over time. Especially in 2023, there was a large uptick in unique page revisions for the OA wiki page. For the GBR wiki page, the unique page revisions peaked in 2005/2006 and has generally declined since then.
Overall, this analysis can shed some light on the public’s interest in the GBR due to the wiki page views in late 2016, which is potentially tied to the mass bleaching event that occurred. The public has shown decreasing interest in both topics over time, as there is a general decreasing trend within both page views. This issue is quite important, and something that the public should be more concerned and knowledgeable about. Spreading awareness of this issue is crucial and Wikipedia pages are a good first step at obtaining basic knowledge about this pressing environmental issue.
