On Sunday November 1, New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta will appear on C-SPAN’s “Q&A” with host and network founder Brian Lamb. In the three-minute excerpt below, Auletta talks about Google’s algorithm, search engine optimization, and Wikipedia:
Auletta’s expertise stretches far beyond the media mogul interviews he writes for his magazine’s editors — in 2001 he wrote a book on Microsoft and its enemies — but wait for the part where Lamb stumps Auletta on Google search results.
Michael Jackson’s sudden and shocking death just about blew up the Internet this past week, and Wikipedia was no exception, even getting briefly knocked offline. And as the New York Times’ tech reporter Noam Cohen reported, the stunning news produced another milestone for Wikipedia:
The Michael Jackson entry in Wikipedia Thursday evening appeared to have set the record as having the highest traffic in the eight-year history of the online encyclopedia.
In the 7 p.m. hour alone Thursday, shortly after Mr. Jackson’s death was confirmed, there were nearly one million visitors to that article. (In fact, for that hour more than 250,000 visitors went to the misspelled entry “Micheal Jackson.” Even his brother Randy Jackson had 25,000 visits that hour.)
“We suspect this is most in a one-hour period of any article in Wikipedia history,” said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.
The article goes on to note that this represented about 1 percent of Wikipedia’s total traffic on the day — this may not sound like much, until you recall the English Wikipedia has more than 2.9 million articles. Writing midday Friday, Cohen predicted that the article could surpass 5 million visits on Friday. As it happens, Cohen set his target a little too low:
1.4 million visits is pretty remarkable, but 5.9 million visits in unprecendented. However, there is one discrepancy: yesterday’s estimates from User:Henrik’s Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool (and Cohen’s article) put the figure at 1.8 million visits, which means the numbers where somehow reconciled downward in the interim. I’ll be looking to find out why. And while Cohen names as a point of comparison President Barack Obama’s Wikipedia article, which received 2.3 million visits on Election Day, I know of a page that received more traffic still and offers a better comparison:
That spike you are looking at occurred on the day that Senator John McCain announced Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in the final days of August, 2008 (as previously discussed on Blog P.I.). Between Jackson and Palin we have one well-known but mysterious and one little-known but suddenly very public figure, thrust into the middle of a breaking news story. By comparison, Obama was a highly visible public figure and Election Day was known far in advance. Perhaps that actually makes the 2.3 million that day even more impressive. But it’s hard to read much more into bar graphs such as this beyond acknowledging they represent a sudden and externally-driven interest in the subject.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that the article containing the information people presumably want most, Death of Michael Jackson, has not recorded anything like the traffic of the primary MJ article:
Why is this the case? Part of the answer is the power of Google, which is the overwhelming driver of traffic to Wikipedia. On that note, I don’t know about you, but in the past 24 hours, Michael Jackson’s official site and his Wikipedia article have traded places on Google, with Wikipedia now ranked first overall. Second, the link to this article is found deep in the primary one, albeit of course at the top of the section concerning his death. Still, 527 is a rounding error compared to 5.9 million. Perhaps the Michael Jackson article itself satisfied their curiosity, before clicking over to iTunes and downloading a copy of Thriller.
And one last, somewhat morbid note: it is strange indeed that the King of Pop is no longer covered by Wikipedia’s Biography of living persons guideline.
Update: In the comments, one of the more knowledegable Wikipedia editors, Tvoz, suggests I’m wrong on the last point:
One thing: actually Michael Jackson’s article *is* still covered by the “biographies of living people” guidelines. Those guidelines protect the integrity of Wikipedia’s articles and intend to thwart defamation, and it is expected that editors will continue to follow the policy and remove poorly sourced defamatory material immediately, even after the death. His family members are alive, and causes of action as a result of such defamatory material could still be brought.
An interesting point, and I think a fair clarification. My inclination is to say this means that Jackson’s family members are still covered by BLP, and this means that any material on the Michael Jackson page must conform to the policy in order to protect them, rather than MJ himself. And of course, spurious information shouldn’t be added at any time — and Jackson’s continued celebrity probably means that this page will be scrutinized more than most.
Count as one member Examiner.com personal finance columnist Steve Juetten, who writes in a review comparing Microsoft’s newly launched search engine, Bing, with old standby Google:
Before I started the search, I set two rules. First, I was looking for information from reliable sources. As a result, if a search placed information from Wikipedia high on the list, the search engine sank in my review. As with information from any source (human, web or book), trust but verify and Wikipedia is not trustworthy when it comes to your money.
Anyone who spends much time around Wikipedia is pretty familiar with complaints such as these, and to this end the Wikipedia community maintains a page called Replies to common objections. Juetten isn’t quite specific enough for me to highlight a particular section, but I’m pretty sure he will find some answers in the answers to “Wikipedia can never be high quality“.
Meanwhile, a few objections to his objection do occur to me. For one thing, who is to say that other sources will be more trustworthy? Juetten undoubtedly singles out Wikipedia for its high profile, but it’s difficult to see why it should be placed at a disadvantage to About.com, Answers.com or NNDB, all of which can rank well for certain terms.*
Are these other information resources likely to be more reliable? I know of no reason why they should be. And if About.com or NNDB does happen to be wrong, there’s not a thing you can do about it.
Lastly, I agree with Juetten that “trust but verify” is a good personal rule and a sound approach to research, but I don’t understand why he doesn’t extend it to Wikipedia when this is an area in which Wikipedia often shines. One of the site’s core content policies is in fact Verifiability, that articles need references. But Juetten’s objection becomes even more ironic when you consider that said references are required to meet another core policy: Reliable sources.
Juetten’s worldly cynicism is understandable but, in this case, selectively applied and ultimately misplaced. It is true that Wikipedia is not completely reliable, but it shouldn’t be penalized for being one of the few reference websites that actually admits the fact.
_____
*For example, try searching for Alan Greenspan on Google and Alan Greenspan on Bing. As of this morning, the top three results for each are: Wikipedia, Answers.com and NNDB.