Wikipedia Blackout and MLibrary Site Search

January 20, 2012

The Great Wikipedia Protest Blackout of 2012 did not result in any particularly significant increase in site searching at the University of Michigan Library. While traffic was up on January 18, 2012, over the same day the previous week, (January 11), the increase was about the same as for the day before and the day after -- reflecting the increasing workload of the academic semester more than any Wikipedia-inspired bump.

January 18 compared to January 11, 2012

Here are some numbers to illustrate the point. For "Outage Wednesday" compared to the previous Wednesday (January 11), searches were up slightly: 4% overall, and 14.5% for the default default "MLibrary" site search:

Search Kind 1/18/12 1/11/12 Change Percent
MLibrary 4260 3719 541 14.55%
Catalog 4518 4870 -352 -7.23%
Articles 1805 1579 226 14.31%
Total 10583 10168 415 4.08%

January 17 compared to January 10, 2012

However, a somewhat larger overall increase is noted between the Tuesday before (January 17) and the Tuesday a week earlier (January 10): up 9% overall and 10% for the default "MLibrary" site search:

Search Kind 1/17/12 1/10/12 Change Percent
MLibrary 4297 3894 403 10.35%
Catalog 5326 5427 -101 -1.86%
Articles 2211 1465 746 50.92%
Total 11834 10786 1048 9.72%

January 6-12 compared to January 13-19, 2012

For a 7 day week extending from the Friday before the outage to the Thursday after, when compared to the previous week, we see an actual decrease in Outage Week over the week before (a decrease of 2.45% overall, although a small 2.2 percent increase in the default "MLibrary" site search:

Search Kind 1/13-1/19 1/6-1/12 Change Percent
MLibrary 23640 23130 510 2.20%
Catalog 28499 32906 -4407 -13.39%
Articles 11114 8805 2309 26.22%
Total 63253 64841 -1588 -2.45%

Posted by Ken Varnum at 02:25 PM. Permalink | Comments (0)