Popularity of UK political parties on Wikipedia
Published:
With the 2015 General Election on the way, I thought I’d compare how popular the main UK political parties are on Wikipedia.
I gathered the Wikipedia page view data with the wikipediatrend R package, and made the plots with dygraphs and ggplot2. The traffic covers 1 March to 2 May 2015, and only the English-language version of each article.
Wikipedia interest in Labour, the Conservatives, and UKIP tracks closely together. A second tier is made up of the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, which pull in a similar number of page views. The Greens have the lowest total of the main parties, though with a marked peak on 1 April.
Every party saw a jump in traffic around the major TV debates (2, 16, and 30 April 2015).
Page views for political party articles reliably dip at weekends — the pattern holds across all of them. Here’s how it looks for Labour:
