The public organization “Wikimedia Ukraine” analyzed the statistics of visits to the online encyclopedia and named the 100 most popular articles of the Ukrainian-language section of Wikipedia for three months of the big war (by the way, today is the 100th day of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine).
Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, the traffic of Wikipedia, traditionally one of the most popular sites in Ukraine, has grown significantly – for the first time since May 2020, when the coronavirus disease was spreading in Ukraine, the traffic of the Ukrainian Wikipedia exceeded 100 million times a month.
As expected, the list was topped by the article “Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)” , which received almost 2.5 million views in 90 days since its creation. For example, the most popular article of 2021 “Ukraine” received only one million views in 12 months.
Of the famous people, the most popular in the Ukrainian Wikipedia were people associated with the war; particularly distinguished in popular culture. In particular, Ukrainian figures: Alexey Arestovich (1,846 thousand views), Vladimir Zelensky (309 thousand), Valery Zaluzhny (305 thousand) and Vitaliy Kim (257 thousand); representatives of the aggressor state: Vladimir Zhirinovsky (488 thousand) and Vladimir Putin (419 thousand).
Among historical figures, Stepan Bandera (637 thousand) became the most popular . Also popular was the Ukrainian agricultural entrepreneur Alexander Povoroznyuk (216 thousand), who became the inspiration for the popular music track VOVA and Bash their Blyad.
Articles about various types of weapons, as expected, gained considerable popularity in wartime: the Russian operational-tactical missile system Iskander (501,000); tactical missile system Tochka (430 thousand); a family of Russian cruise missiles Caliber (420 thousand); Turkish strike drone Bayraktar TB2 (399 thousand); an article about the former Russian flagship of the Black Sea Fleet missile cruiser Moskva , destroyed by the Ukrainian Naval Forces on April 13 (more than 402 thousand).
Articles about other wars in which the Russian Federation was the aggressor or active party to the conflict became popular: the Russian-Georgian war (294,000), the first Russian-Chechen war (186,000), and the civil war in Syria (146,000).
Traditionally, Ukrainians have used Wikipedia to learn more about topics that have been heavily covered in the news: the US military aid program Lend-Lease (307,000); the shooting song “Oh, there is a red viburnum in the meadow” (254 thousand); international interbank system SWIFT (211 thousand); Ukrainian group Kalush (196 thousand), which this year became the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. They were also interested in the meaning and history of various terms that often appear in the information space: Rashism (467 thousand), Denazification (236 thousand), Katsap (151 thousand).
The 100 most visited also include several articles that traditionally have a high coverage in the Ukrainian Wikipedia: Ukraine (570 thousand), Kiev (239 thousand), Shevchenko Taras Grigoryevich (176 thousand), Ukrainian language (175 thousand).
