The Wikipedia charts

I have a serious love/hate relationship with Wikipedia. On the one hand, I use it when I need some quick info or when I'm getting started on researching something and I am looking for some quick references. Wiki has been good for my aging brain that can't seem to keep all the theories and authors in my mind that I'd like to eventually move into my long-term memory. On the other hand, my students have a proclivity of looking things up on Wikipedia as well. I tell them that they should use Wikipedia for their own knowledge and to not treat it like an "objective " (which is also questionable) source of information that they can simply cite in their papers and list as a source in their References page. But no, do students listen to me??? That's another post for another day...

So I was reading the highlights of academic blogs in the Chronicle of Higher Education daily emails I get. I love reading some of the stuff that comes up on academic blogs because I feel like I'm not the only weirdo academic who thinks about this stupid stuff all the time. So yesterday's daily email was especially interesting because there was a post entitled "The Wikipedia Charts"which was really funny.

So the post is basically about a Wiki admin in Sweden developed a method of tracking traffic to particular Wiki pages. Even though the software is in beta, the writer, David Glenn did a quick search for about a dozen social scientists and theorists in Feb 2002. This is what came up:

Milton Friedman: 57,736
Cornel West: 49,234
Jacques Derrida: 31,719
Friedrich Hayek: 21,466
Jean Baudrillard: 21,217
Pierre Bourdieu: 20,953
Walter Benjamin: 19,642
Hannah Arendt: 19,057
John Kenneth Galbraith: 17,940
Judith Butler: 16,739
Louis Althusser: 11,274
Philip Zimbardo: 11,014
Richard Rorty: 9697
Martha Nussbaum: 8757
Carol Gilligan: 8549
Theodor Adorno: 8116
Austan Goolsbee: 7826
Alasdair MacIntyre: 6918
Eugene Fama: 5806
Zygmunt Bauman: 5298
Kwame Anthony Appiah: 3837
Daniel Bell: 3168
Jagdish Bhagwati: 2277
Claude Steele: 1758
Susan Athey: 1049
Dani Rodrik: 913

What is surprising about this list is how many hits (or few hits I should also say) these folks get. I've looked up Bourdieu, Althusser, Benjamin and Baudrillard in the past three months myself so I thought it was really neat to see the numbers of other people also looking them up. I concluded that I'm not the only geek out there (yay all you other grad students!).

On the other hand, Glenn ended with a search for the latest presidential candidates and found:
Barack Obama’s page was viewed 2,625,243 times and John McCain’s page was viewed 1,614,941 times. The numerical difference is absolutely staggering. Ironically, fitness guru Richard Simmons’s page was viewed 40,298 times. Go Sweatin' to the Oldies!