February 8th, 2010
The Who?
Views: The Who
We started tracking Wikipedia page views in January. While there are certainly dedicated sources for learning about bands and musicians, All Music Guide being one of my favorite, people overwhelmingly turn to an artist’s Wikipedia page for biographical information and sociological context.
As the above graph shows, people turned to the free encyclopedia before, during and after The Who played at half time of Superbowl XLIV. Their Wikipedia page recorded nearly 700,000 visits on Sunday, typically that number is more like 10,000 visits a day.
I thought The Who delivered a strong performance, especially compared with the lackluster effort of Springsteen and Petty the previous two years. Unfortunately, we don’t have historical data to see how Wikipedia page views spiked for Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Prince, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, or the infamous “Wardrobe Malfunction” in 2004.
PS: add/editing Wikipedia URLs is now enabled for all artists in our system.
PPS: we’re still hiring! Check out the jobs page for more info.
I love these little snippets of information.
Springsteen's SuperBowl performance was the best halftime show ever. Your editorial remarks reveal the bias of this site. The Who, on the other hand, did an overly long rendition of "Won't Get Fooled Again" that killed all the time thereby stopping them from playing other stuff that fans were hoping they would play.