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Not surprisingly, there has obviously been a major uptick in -related activity as there is renewed interest and presumably as people have been rewatching the Star Wars movies leading up to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Is anyone interested in writing the queries and providing a (possibly ongoing) analysis of the trends of activity on Star Wars-related posts?

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  • I'd consider it once I’ve seen the film; right now I’m maintaining as far a distance as I can from anything to do with the star-wars tag.
    – alexwlchan
    Dec 16, 2015 at 8:09
  • @alexwchan that might be best SEDE tends to lag behind.
    – AncientSwordRage Mod
    Dec 16, 2015 at 8:21

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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There has been an awakening1.

I'm using as a baseline, because they're my graphs and I want to.

Question growth over time

enter image description here

The above graph shows question growth in absolute numbers. Star Wars questions (blue line) have been growing more-or-less constantly since July 2012, and slightly slower (at least recently) than Star Trek (red line) questions. There is, however, a very slight uptick in the last few days. In the interests of exploring that better, I modified my query slightly

enter image description here

You can see the Star Wars line (now the yellow line, not blue) begin to grow fairly significantly starting on December 17.

Percentage Question Growth

enter image description here

The above graph shows the change in percentage of Star Wars questions. There has been an uptick, beginning in about August, that got suddenly very large near the end of December. Looking just for the month of December, we can see that this very closely resembles the previous graph:

enter image description here

Question Statistics

This one is going to be less scientific.

enter image description here

Compare to my graph from last week:

enter image description here

And to an analysis I did in November:

We can see that views on Star Wars questions have gone up a fair amount in the intervening period, but other statistics have grown only a small bit. Average answer score has actually gone down, which I can only attribute to a sudden influx of low-quality but not-deleteable answers from new users.

There are, of course, always exceptions; all of my numbers here are averages. A particularly extreme example2 is In what order should the Star Wars movies be watched?, which has gone from 341K views and +167 score in April 2015 to 787K views and +190 score at time of writing.

1 Disclaimer: at time of writing, SEDE was last updated December 20, so these stats are a few days out of date. I'll revisit this after SEDE updates on December 27, subject to my own schedule

2 Nod to CreationEdge for pointing out this edge case

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  • More stats: This SW question had 341K views in April and it grew to 572K in October and is now at 786K views. That's a tremendous amount of growth for a 4 year old question.
    – user31178
    Dec 17, 2015 at 17:12
  • @CreationEdge That seems like it would be a popular one in the leadup to a new movie. Thanks for pointing it out!
    – Jason Baker
    Dec 17, 2015 at 18:28
  • have you acounted for some TFA questions lacking star-wars?
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Dec 23, 2015 at 3:20
  • @DVK I did not, but there are only five of them, so they wouldn't have much of an effect anyway
    – Jason Baker
    Dec 23, 2015 at 3:21
  • @JasonBaker - makes sense. Seemed a lot more, but I suppose people fixed that via edits
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Dec 23, 2015 at 3:22
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Just look at the tag statistics (as of today, 22 Dec at around 18:30 UTC):

enter image description here

: 36 asked this week, 121 this month
: 13 asked this week, 74 this month
: 33 asked today, 194 this week
: 11 asked this week, 74 this month
: 15 asked this week, 49 this month
: 11 asked this week, 23 this month
: 16 asked this month, 357 this year
: 7 asked this week, 65 this month
: 22 asked this month, 300 this year
: 9 asked this week, 36 this month
: 19 asked this week, 34 this month
: 5 asked this week, 14 this month
: 27 asked this month, 392 this year
: 7 asked this month, 159 this year
: 7 asked this month, 95 this year
: 10 asked this month, 137 this year

There have been more Star Wars questions in the last 7 days than in all the rest of the top 12 tags put together.

Now that's what I call a disturbance in the Force site!

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  • Please note that this doesn't even account for the fact that plenty of SW7 questions are deliberately not being asked yet. I have a list of about 30 pending questions I have, from watching or reading novelization, and didn't post even one of them because of rep cap.
    – DVK-on-Ahch-To
    Dec 23, 2015 at 3:19

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