One of my Canadian friends on twitter (Alex Ferguson of St. John Lutheran Church in Ottawa) showed me this fantastic beta tool: it calculates the daily number of times a certain term is searched on Wikipedia. (If you click on the history tab on any Wikipedia page, there is a tiny link for page view statistics.)

Example: you can see how many times people looked up the term “Christmas” over the last two months. (More than 2 million people did.) Wiki searches for this term increased through the holidays, but almost no one searched for the term on Christmas day. Everyone was too busy celebrating and relaxing, I suppose.

With all the coverage of John 3:16 and Tim Tebow, Barna Group recently released a study on Americans’ cursory knowledge of the biblical reference. Part of our interest, in conjunction with American Bible Society, was to determine if people even know what the “3” in John 3:16 refers to—would people even know where to look or what the reference meant?

My Canadian friend pointed me to the Wiki searches for John 3:16 over the last 60 days. During that time, the tool indicates that “John 3:16” has generated more than 375,000 searches.

Check out the graphic and notice a few things:

• Nearly half of the searches (183,009) came in just two days—the Monday and Tuesday (January 9 and 10) after Tim Tebow threw for 316 yards in a playoff game. If you recall, Twitter and Facebook and traditional media exploded with talk about uncanny spiritual symbolism of the Denver quarterback’s exploits.
• About a week later, Denver played a second playoff game and Focus on the Family aired a commercial featuring children reciting John 3:16. The Wiki search results showed a much smaller spike—about 9% of the 60-day searches (32,056)—on Saturday and Sunday (January 14 and 15).
• I think it’s interesting that during the Christmas holiday—including the weeks preceding the celebration of the birth of Christ—there was no notable increase in Wiki searches for John 3:16. I suppose this is not a typical Christmas verse, but I thought it seemed missing.

I grant you that the search calculation tool looks very much like a beta—or unfinished—product. It also does not tell us much about who or where the searches are coming from—in this case whether from Christians or non-Christians. So, I would not put too much weight to the data, beyond casual cultural analysis.

Still, it’s fun to play around with the tool a bit. Try using terms or individuals from politics and pop culture. You will see that it seems to provide a fair glimpse into what’s on our collective minds.

What, if anything, does this peek into digital measurement tools tell us about spiritual influence today? I bet you’ll do some searching using the tool. If you do, come back here and let us know what you searched for and what you learned.