The COVID-19 pandemic and the US presidential election became the most sought-after agenda items of Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, throughout 2020. Seven articles on two topics made it to the top 10 of the most viewed articles of the last 12 months. These seven articles generated a total of 297 million page views. The top 10 articles generated a total of 396 million page views.
Traffic to Wikipedia articles underscores the site’s authority as an information source, and the initial doubts about the reliability of an encyclopedia anyone can edit seem to disappear. Google now displays Wikipedia results directly in search results using snippets from the site.
Owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia has put a lot of energy and effort into polishing its reputation. They worked hard to avoid misleading information, especially in the presidential elections. More than 56,000 volunteer editors have maintained Wikipedia’s nearly 2,000 election-related pages, using real-time feeds to monitor changes in material. Similarly, Wikipedia has about 7,000 pages on COVID-19, providing almost 580 million combined page views.
Top 10 on Wikipedia in 2020 – Top 10:
1. COVID-19 pandemic
Viewed by: 83,040,504
2. Donald Trump
Views: 55,472,791
3. Deaths in 2020 (Deaths in 2020)
Views: 42,262,147
4. Kamala Harris
Views: 38,319,706
5. Joe Biden
Views: 34,281,120
6. Coronavirus
Views: 32,957,565
7. Kobe Bryant
Views: 32,863,656
8. COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory (COVID-19 outbreak by country and region)
Views: 28,575,982
10. Queen Elizabeth II
Views: 24,147,675
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