R popularity – steady growth and New York Times

August 6, 2011

(This article was first published on Expansed » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

I have just came up with an idea how to test the wikipedia search traffic visualisation functions that I wrote about in my previous post. I decided to check if R is really gaining popularity that fast.

ar <- wikiStat("R_(programming_language)", monback = 45, lang= 'en')
wikiPlotStat(ar,
      "Wikipedia search traffic for 'R (programming language)'")

What we can see here is that there is a steady growth in number of people who want to find out what is it all about. There is also one large spike. Initially I thought that it may be simply due to some kind of a bug in Wikipedia traffic statistics. But maybe something happened in January 2009?

It seems that The New York Times made quite a good job by popularizing R. Since this publication there is a real boost in number of people searching for “R (programming language)” on wikipedia.

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