The Melbourne Storm cheating controversy with their salary camp has gotten a fair amount of attention by the Australian Twitter community and in local newspapers. Given that, I was curious to see how the Wikipedia community had responded in terms of number of edits to the Melbourne Storm article. I took a look at the article’s history about an hour before I posted this entry. I then counted the total number of edits by day. Wikipedia’s history is recorded at UTC. This is a bit important when looking at time related data…
Melbourne Storm Wikipedia Edits
| Date | Number of Edits |
|---|---|
| 20-Apr | 6 |
| 21-Apr | 0 |
| 22-Apr | 90 |
| 23-Apr | 56 |
| 24-Apr | 69 |
| 25-Apr | 6 |
| 26-Apr | 6 |
Most of the edits were made on April 22. This was, based on UTC, the day the story broke. Total edits spiked again on April 24. After that, there was a huge drop off. The story broke quickly, people edited and then after most of the pertinent details were added, they stopped editing. Some of the drop off can probably be explained by: (Protected Melbourne Storm: Excessive vandalism ([edit=autoconfirmed] (expires 09:52, 1 May 2010 (UTC)) [move=autoconfirmed] (expires 09:52, 1 May 2010 (UTC)))).
It is an interesting bit of pattern behavior and it would be interesting to go into further depth regarding other historical editing patterns for the article and who edited the article, and if they had ever edited the article prior to this latest controversy. That’s for another post some time in the future.
Edited to add: There is an Italian language article about the Melbourne Storm. There have been 15 total edits to the article singe it was created on December 21, 2007. The article had 2 edits in 2008 and 1 in 2009. In period of breaking news around this story, there has been 1 new edit made to the article.
More edited to add: There is a French language article about the Melbourne Storm. It was created on March 1, 2006. There have been 27 total edits to the article since the controversy started. There were 59 total edits to the article, including these.
