ON January 15, the famous universal and multilingual online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, turns 20. Each month, no less than 22 billion of its pages are viewed, allowing internet users the world over to find answers to (almost) all of their questions.
Wikipedia has its highest audience in the US, with an average three billion page views every month, way ahead of Japan and Germany, with around one billion page views, or France, with between 500 and 700 million page views per month.
Wikipedia has over 434 million pages and is currently available in 316 languages, although with varying amounts of available information for each language. The encyclopedia counts more than 6.2 million articles in English, the platform's most-used language. In second place comes Cebuano, spoken in the Philippines, which has 5.4 million articles. This is followed by Swedish (3.4 M), German (2.5 M) and French (2.2 M). More than 280,000 contributors edit the pages of Wikipedia each month.
Whatever the language, the page dedicated to the covid-19 pandemic was, by far, the most widely viewed in 2020.
