Another possibility is that Wikipedia is facing increased competition from other info providers such as content marketers?
Edit: I suppose you might measure this effect by trying to see if Wikipedia’s position in search engine rankings has dropped. Or alternatively, it might be interesting to compare Wikipedia traffic for a particular concept to Google Trends for that concept. If it’s a concept that doesn’t get discussed much on social media, and Google Trends is increasing while Wikipedia is declining, that seems like evidence against the social media displacement hypothesis.
Great points. As I noted in the post, search and social media are the two most likely proximal mechanisms of causation for the part of the decline that’s real. But neither may represent the “ultimate” cause: the growth of alternate content sources, or better marketing by them, or changes in user habits, might be what’s driving the changes in social media and search traffic patterns (in the sense that the reason Google’s showing different results, or Facebook is making some content easier to share, is itself driven by some combination of what’s out there and what users want).
The main challenge with search engine ranking data is that (a) the APIs forbid downloading the data en masse across many search terms, and (b) getting historical data is difficult. Some SEO companies offer historical data, but based on research Issa and I did last year, we’d have to pay a decent amount to even be able to see if the data they have is helpful to us, and it may very well not be.
The problem with Google Trends is that (a) it does a lot of normalization (it normalizes search volume relative to total search volume at the time), which makes it tricky to interpret data over time, and (b) it’s hard to download data en masse. Also, a lot of Google Trends results are just amusingly weird, e.g. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook (see https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10208985033078964 for more discussion)-- are we really to believe that interest in Facebook spiked in October 2012, and that it has returned in 2017 (after a 5-year decline) to what it used to be back in 2009? Google Trends is just yet another messy data series that I would have to acquire expertise in the nuances of, not a reliable beacon of truth against which Wikipedia data can be compared.
The one external data source I have been able to collect with reasonable reliability is Facebook share counts. At the end of each month, I record Facebook share counts for a number of Wikipedia pages by hitting the Facebook API (a process that takes several days because of Facebook’s rate limiting). Based on this I now have decent time series of cumulative Facebook share counts, such as https://wikipediaviews.org/displayviewsformultiplemonths.php?tag=Colors&allmonths=allmonths-api&language=en&drilldown=cumulative-facebook-shares If I do a more detailed analysis, this data will be important for evaluating the social media hypothesis.
How interested are you in seeing an exploration of the search engine ranking and increased use of social media hypotheses?
are we really to believe that interest in Facebook spiked in October 2012, and that it has returned in 2017 (after a 5-year decline) to what it used to be back in 2009
That seems very plausible to me; this kind of cyclical interest seems pretty common for social sites. This would also explain Facebook’s eagerness to acquire up-and-comers like Instagram and Snapchat.
How interested are you in seeing an exploration of the search engine ranking and increased use of social media hypotheses?
Somewhat interested, although I’m also not super clear on what relevance we think Wikipedia traffic has in the grand scheme of things.
Another possibility is that Wikipedia is facing increased competition from other info providers such as content marketers?
Edit: I suppose you might measure this effect by trying to see if Wikipedia’s position in search engine rankings has dropped. Or alternatively, it might be interesting to compare Wikipedia traffic for a particular concept to Google Trends for that concept. If it’s a concept that doesn’t get discussed much on social media, and Google Trends is increasing while Wikipedia is declining, that seems like evidence against the social media displacement hypothesis.
Great points. As I noted in the post, search and social media are the two most likely proximal mechanisms of causation for the part of the decline that’s real. But neither may represent the “ultimate” cause: the growth of alternate content sources, or better marketing by them, or changes in user habits, might be what’s driving the changes in social media and search traffic patterns (in the sense that the reason Google’s showing different results, or Facebook is making some content easier to share, is itself driven by some combination of what’s out there and what users want).
The main challenge with search engine ranking data is that (a) the APIs forbid downloading the data en masse across many search terms, and (b) getting historical data is difficult. Some SEO companies offer historical data, but based on research Issa and I did last year, we’d have to pay a decent amount to even be able to see if the data they have is helpful to us, and it may very well not be.
The problem with Google Trends is that (a) it does a lot of normalization (it normalizes search volume relative to total search volume at the time), which makes it tricky to interpret data over time, and (b) it’s hard to download data en masse. Also, a lot of Google Trends results are just amusingly weird, e.g. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook (see https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10208985033078964 for more discussion)-- are we really to believe that interest in Facebook spiked in October 2012, and that it has returned in 2017 (after a 5-year decline) to what it used to be back in 2009? Google Trends is just yet another messy data series that I would have to acquire expertise in the nuances of, not a reliable beacon of truth against which Wikipedia data can be compared.
The one external data source I have been able to collect with reasonable reliability is Facebook share counts. At the end of each month, I record Facebook share counts for a number of Wikipedia pages by hitting the Facebook API (a process that takes several days because of Facebook’s rate limiting). Based on this I now have decent time series of cumulative Facebook share counts, such as https://wikipediaviews.org/displayviewsformultiplemonths.php?tag=Colors&allmonths=allmonths-api&language=en&drilldown=cumulative-facebook-shares If I do a more detailed analysis, this data will be important for evaluating the social media hypothesis.
How interested are you in seeing an exploration of the search engine ranking and increased use of social media hypotheses?
That seems very plausible to me; this kind of cyclical interest seems pretty common for social sites. This would also explain Facebook’s eagerness to acquire up-and-comers like Instagram and Snapchat.
Somewhat interested, although I’m also not super clear on what relevance we think Wikipedia traffic has in the grand scheme of things.