By Josh Greene, The Mather Group
The Chaos Index is The Mather Group’s proprietary metric for measuring turbulence throughout Wikipedia and tracking the community’s current sentiment towards corporate-related pages. The index measures community actions such as editing frequency, content deletion, message board posts, and many other activities that contribute to unstable corporate page environments.
- This month’s Chaos Index sits at 68, a slight increase over April, and matching normal patterns of activity we typically see heading into Q2 every year.
- Articles for Creation wait times and pages nominated for deletion saw an uptick this month – though we’ve not seen an increase in the percentage of pages deleted by Wikipedia (either new or existing), these are both trends we are watching in the next few months.
- After a small respite to begin the year, sockpuppet investigations continue at extremely high levels for the third month in a row, a prescient reminder of the handful of dedicated editors fighting vandalism and promotional editing on the platform.
As an open platform, Wikipedia is always home to interesting, experimental tools – not only those designed to help the platform operate more efficiently, but to utilize the platform’s open, accessible data and statistics to have a real-world impact on the world.
Recently, scientists from the National History Museum developed a new tool called the Species Awareness Index (or SAI) as part of a study published in Conservation Biology. The SAI is designed to help monitor biodiversity through real-time tracking of Wikipedia pageviews, monitoring 40,000 different species across 10 popular Wikipedia language editions.
Originally designed in 2015 as a static tool to measure society’s changing interest in different species, the SAI is now designed to monitor monthly trends in the pageviews of various species – a function heavily inspired by the Living Planet Index, measuring changes in vertebrate population over time. This index, which the authors hopes will provide a “global index of changing biodiversity awareness”, is the first entirely automated conservation culturomic platform, and another great reminder of the sometimes-unseen potential Wikipedia can provide for all of Earth’s creatures.
The Mather Group, a Capitol Communicator sponsor, is a boutique digital marketing and online reputation agency that focuses on SEO, Wikipedia and effective marketing for businesses.
0 Comments