Proposing a new data source for conflict forecasting

23 May 2022

The paper “Click click boom: Using Wikipedia data to predict changes in battle-related deaths” by Christian Oswald, Research Associate at KompZ KFE, and co-author Daniel Ohrenhofer was published in International Interactions. Wikipedia data are cheap, readily and openly available, updated in real-time, and provide global coverage, thus overcoming, to some extent, limitations of other commonly used data sources. Christian and Daniel argue that the number of country page views indicates international salience or interest in a country while the number of changes to a country page indicates political controversy between opposing political views. They find evidence that country page views do increase predictive performance while page changes do not and outline several avenues for future research.

The paper and further information can be found here (https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2022.2061969).