Did you read the paper? They did not even track the ISIS pages. They had a small group of pages which they tracked and a control group (see the appendix)<p>They did not compare it to the news cycle, or consider that people are reading different pages about the same subject (AQ in Iraq for example being superseded by ISIS).<p>Sorry if I sound harsh but this study was terribly executed.<p>Doing it properly would require a lot more resources than Wikipedia daily page view dumps. I think the NY Times would be well placed to do a study on this using Wikipedia page views, their page views and their mentions of topics overtime.