Something caught my eye as I was checking out the Discover magazine homepage today (the article is here if you don't want to bother with my insight into this topic.) Predicting the success of movies has been a notoriously difficult process as most indicators have proved ineffective at doing so, especially as compared to the predictability of some other trends. What they have recently though is that the popularity (and therefore financial success) of a movie can be linked to the amount of time and the number of edits on their wikipedia page in the weeks and days leading up to the premiere. Essentially the idea is that people take a certain amount of ownership for certain works that they associate with, and that for every person that is doing this that it correlates to a certain fixed amount that aren't.

This of course refers to comic book movies as well, in fact probably more so, as comic movies are at the moment pretty much box office gold for movie studios. It is also reasonable that this same rule applies to other wikis. I am sure that it applies to the movies on Comic Vine as well (even when we have no firm rules as to what constitutes a movie which should be added to the wiki). What is interesting for me though is the absolute inaccuracy of this as it would be applied to comics themselves. Whereas there might be some individual issues or volumes that are more edited than others, it is also likely that those volumes have been added in a serial behaviour to the wiki, because they themselves are in a serial format. I suppose in certain case though that such information could be used to predict the success of comics, but only in an extended manner. For instance, one might be able to tell the success of comics by the number of concepts associated to them, or the number of key characters, or even if people consistently break site rules to add certain issues early.