Detecting and gauging impact on Wikipedia page views

Abstract

Understanding how various external campaigns or events affect readership on Wikipedia is important to efforts aimed at improving awareness and access to its content. In this paper, we consider how to build time-series models aimed at predicting page views on Wikipedia with the goal of detecting whether there are significant changes to the existing trends. We test these models on two different events: a video campaign aimed at increasing awareness of Hindi Wikipedia in India and the page preview feature roll-out-a means of accessing Wikipedia content without actually visiting the pages-on English and German Wikipedia. Our models effectively estimate the impact of page preview roll-out, but do not detect a significant change following the video campaign in India. We also discuss the utility of other geographies or language editions for predicting page views from a given area on a given language edition.