Selena Gomez’s Impact on Lupus Awareness

So we can see that major news stories about Selena’s lupus causes an immediate spike in search popularity. But then the popularity goes back to about average (although the most recent spike appears to have a more lasting impact, but only time will tell). So it looks like a major news story about Selena gets people Googling lupus, but does that really impact awareness? So people are Googling lupus, but does that mean they are learning about lupus? Let’s look at Wikipedia Data Wikipedia isn’t the first thing you see when you Google lupus (unlike it is for other things) but people still rely on it to learn about the disease. The nice thing about Wikipedia is that the page views data is public. Below is a chart that shows the number of page views of the lupus wikipedia page since June 2015. Interestingly enough, you see major spikes, on the same dates as the google popularity chart, at about 4x again.

Still puzzling over something?