Wikipedia In The News Analysis

Wikipedia has an "In the news" section which lists current events that have a corresponding Wikipedia article.

What gets posted is determined by the consensus of Wikipedia editors. Usually, this is no more than half a dozen votes for or against.

I wanted to see what articles saw the most support from editors in 2021, so I wrote some robust Python code using BeautifulSoup and pandas to collect and organize these individual supports.

For "recent deaths", only supports for blurbs are considered.

The most supported event articles of 2021:

Article	Number of Supports
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_White	35
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(astronaut)	25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip,_Duke_of_Edinburgh	24
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_trial_of_Donald_Trump	23
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_David_Amess	22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameStop_short_squeeze	21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_Senate_elections	21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings	19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idriss_D%C3%A9by	19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Cuban_protests	19

Now, looking at the pageviews of the articles in the month they occured.

Here is a chart of the normalized support for an article, with the normalized pageviews.

The pageviews for the Betty White and Prince Philip articles were an order of magnitude greater than the others, so they are just displayed as one:

Previous Work