Sunday, January 9, 2011

Activity on Gabrielle Giffords Wikipedia Page Jumped Just Days Before She Was Shot

Brad DeLong nervously points out:
Gabrielle Giffords and Raul Grijalva are both Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Arizona. On Tuesday January 4 the number of hits on the "Gabrielle Giffords" page on Wikipedia began to rise. The number of hits on the "Raul Grijalva" page did not. By Friday January 7 more than three times as many people were looking at Gabrielle Giffords's Wikipedia page than had done so in a normal day in the previous month and a half.

On Saturday January 8, of course, six people were murdered in the course of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords.

Please give me an explanation of this so that I can stop being a nutbar conspiracy theorist...
My suspicion is that this is simply coincidence and proves once again the dangers of drawing conclusions in the field of human action from historical data.

5 comments:

  1. CIA doing some research before their hit...

    ReplyDelete
  2. making conclusions on historic data with just 3 weeks worth of data, is stupid at best.

    i am guessing she's probably on some news talk show or other media related events(or her husband is)....compared to Raul.

    u would see these spikes more if we look at a 6 month or years of historic data. Then u won't stupidly correlate this assassination attempt to wiki traffic.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Other ways to write that sentence: "By Friday January 7 only one fifth as many people were looking at Gabrielle Giffords' wikipedia page than the first half of november"

    http://stats.grok.se/en/201011/Gabrielle_Giffords

    "By Friday January 7 there was a spike in traffic to Giffords' wikipedia page, as happened all the time during 2010"

    http://stats.grok.se/en/201003/Gabrielle_Giffords
    http://stats.grok.se/en/201005/Gabrielle_Giffords
    http://stats.grok.se/en/201007/Gabrielle_Giffords

    "No on was looking at Giffords' wikipedia page before January 8th"

    or

    "Usage to Giffords' page jumped 100,000% percent on January 8th"

    http://stats.grok.se/en/201101/Gabrielle_Giffords


    "People are ten times more interested in baseball than Giffords"

    or

    "Someone was planning to assassinate baseball as usage spiked to nearly double its average since christmas"

    http://stats.grok.se/en/201101/Baseball

    ReplyDelete
  4. All this proves is that Brad DeLong is a careless researcher.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Google site data is typically delayed about 24 hours. So the traffic gleaned from a site will be reported in the next day or two.

    Ken
    www.smart10media.com

    ReplyDelete