The Climate Surrounding Climate Change Wikipedia Articles
In the busy whirlwinds of our lives, it’s a little too easy to forget the abnormal, global rise of temperatures and sea levels, the ceaseless pollution of our air, the drastic increase of extreme weather phenomena, and several more bleak problems that result from the urgent issue of climate change. With these issues comes the opportunity to step up and transform our futures. This is where Wikipedia shines. Through its numerous, free-to-read climate change-related articles, it serves as a beacon of light for education and awareness for the disparities our planet is currently facing.
So, as the dominating online encyclopedia of our time, how does Wikipedia data related to revisions and page views reflect the cultural events and atmosphere surrounding climate change overtime? And what about its more specific problems and solutions?
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People underestimate the insights you can gather from pairing revision data with contextual inference from the “talk” section of Wikipedia articles, where all the editors argue, poll, or discuss the happenings of an article. To lay a foundation, I felt I had to first understand how revisions have changed overtime for the Wikipedia article of climate change.
The two key variables when dealing with Wikipedia revisions are the number of revisions and the size of revisions overtime, in which I’ve aggregated by month here. Oftentimes the two follow in each other’s footsteps, yet there are a few deviations, quite noticeably at the two peaks shadowing over periods of 2006–2007 and 2019–2021. For the former period, the number of revisions skyrocket way above the size. Was there earth-shattering news about climate change that was causing numerous people to contribute to this holy grail of climate knowledge, a deep reflection of our culture’s progression in awareness? No.
In my deep-digging of this 2006–2007 mountain, I discovered two things: “vandalism” and an edit war. To clarify, on June 21st, 2006, a total of 184 revisions were made to combat against “vandalizing” trolls that changed the content of Wikipedia’s climate change article as it gained traction by being featured on Wikipedia’s Main Page. Lots of cleaning up was necessary. Additionally, in March and April of 2007, several revisions were occurring as a sort of ideological battle about whether or not neutrality was being implemented in the article, and how certain sources should be classified (Neutral POV vs. POV). Ultimately, this demonstrates the 2000s growing, yet still uncertain understanding of climate change, reflecting a cultural atmosphere where perhaps its effects were not considered as substantial yet.
For the period of 2019–2021 though, where revision size was at an all-time high, there was a little more hope that awareness about climate change was in fact improving worldwide. 2019 was an important year for climate change awareness and action, key events making history like Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future” strikes gaining huge momentum worldwide, the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit where 77 countries pledged to net zero emissions by 2050, and a “100%” scientific consensus on the cause of climate change.
Additionally, in 2020, a big Wiki merge occurred for global warming, making it a part of the general “Climate Change” Wikipedia article on August 3rd, 2020, leaving quite a bit clean-up work to be done for the next few months. In 2021, several climate change records were absolutely crushed, its effects becoming more eminent. As these several acts of history and activism were in the making, Wikipedia served as a scribe for these events, hence the sharp jump in revision size. I would like to say that this sharp 2019–2021 jump in revision size projects a bit of hope that awareness and action for climate change is improving worldwide, and becoming a culturally agreed-upon phenomena.
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Furthermore, one of the most important dimensions to consider when analyzing a culture’s perception of a topic are the page views for Wikipedia.
As visible here, page views does not appear as fully consistent with revision data, even on a normalized scale. The spikes in views appear rather randomly as a result. After some digging, I realized that the top busiest days for page views were Earth Day on April 22nd, 2022 (and the day right before, weirdly enough), and on June 29th, 2023, a phenomena of extreme weather when close to 500 Canadian Wildfires were prompting extreme haze, polluted air, and elevated temperatures in a majority of North America. Unlike more long-term patterns related to revisions, increases of page views are rather isolated and short term.
Hoping to try to establish a more distinct pattern, I looked at the average amount of page views for the Wikipedia article of climate change per month:
Considering how the top 5 days of page views of the climate change article on Wikipedia were on or around Earth Day, it makes perfect sense as to why April harnesses the greatest average. But as is visible here, it is simply a short-lived popularity with the next months of viewership reaching the lowest averages. As for the increases in September and October, perhaps this could be attributed to the results of fire season from the sweltering summer months being published around this time, or still even happening.
We all know climate change is an umbrella term for the several specific ways our environment is being affected. What happens when you group the viewing activity of multiple Wikipedia articles, first related to the specific issues deriving from climate change and then, the solutions?
For our first graph, despite all having quite varying amounts of of page views, Wikipedia articles about the specific ways that climate change poses problems seem to be decently in sync with one another over time (except that of solely climate change). The effects of climate change article had very little views originally, but seemed to spike up around the same time as the grand merge of the global warming article with the climate change article as a whole in August 2020.
There does seem to be a slight downward trend of these issues. While this could be attributed to disinterest for the topics, it could possibly be due to the sheer amount of climate organization’s websites, sources, etc. that are dominating our search engines as the issue becomes more prevalent with time.
For the second chart, it appears that this downhill trend grows even steeper for the page views of solution-related climate change articles in Wikipedia. What caught my eye was the only thing going against the grain — the positive trend for electric vehicles. It is undeniable that EV companies like Tesla over the last few years, alongside its founder, Elon Musk, have gained immense amounts of traction in our culture (we miss you, Twitter!)— which is reflected well by the EV viewing activity of the Wiki article itself. Hybrid and fully electric car models likely take the popularity cake out of all these solutions as they are viewed as one of the primary ways we can inch closer to our net 0 emission goals.
Wikipedia data can take us on quite the journey. Evidently, article revisions and page views both have a strong potential to reflect attitudes of society towards topics, especially that of climate change.
