~/projects/general-conference/attention
What gets searched and shared
The corpus records what was said; this study looks for the trace it left outside. Wikipedia publishes the daily readership of every article, so for every talk since 2015 by a speaker who has one, the week after the talk can be set against the month before. Google Trends adds the search interest in a few tracked phrases.
What stands out
- A talk multiplies its speaker's Wikipedia readership by 13.1 in the week that follows, and 94% of talks at least double it.
- A new calling adds little to the spike: ×13.71 in the year a calling begins against ×13 otherwise. The week after a talk is about the talk, not the call.
- Seventy see the largest relative spikes (×164.68, from 5 readers a day); First Presidency the largest absolute ones (+16,326 readers in the week from 213 a day).
- Among speakers not newly called, James R. Rasband's “Ensuring a Righteous Judgment” (2020) moved readers most, ×956.06. In absolute terms Henry B. Eyring's week after “Gratitude on the Sabbath Day” (2016) drew 83,824 extra readers.
- A conference weekend multiplies the readership of all its speakers' articles by ×34.65 at most (2015-10), from 1,743 to 60,418 a day.
- Dallin H. Oaks is the most-read speaker, at 771 article views a day over the last year.
Loading the study…
Model card
- Data
- Daily English Wikipedia pageviews (all access, human users) from the Wikimedia REST API for every speaker whose leader record links an article, July 2015 to today; 487 talks by 56 speakers. Conference talks are dated to the Saturday of the first full weekend of April or October; BYU talks carry their own dates. Google Trends monthly United States interest for fifteen tracked terms, read through pytrends.
- Spike
- Mean daily views over the seven days from the talk date divided by the median of days seven to thirty-four before it; extra readers is that difference times seven. A speaker is newly called when the leadership database records a calling that began in the talk's year. Conference weekends sum every speaking leader's article.
- Known failure modes
- Only leaders with an English Wikipedia article count, which excludes most Seventies and all BYU speakers without one. Several talks on one weekend share one spike, so a talk's ratio is partly the weekend's. Readership follows news, deaths and calls as much as talks. Trends values are relative to each term's own peak and cannot be compared in level across terms.
Methods and data for the corpus as a whole.