General Election 2015 is coming so I decided to compare the popularity of the main UK political parties on Wikipedia.

I gathered the data about the Wikipedia page views using wikipediatrend R package. Pretty plots were made with dygraphs and ggplot2. Wikipedia article traffic was collected from 1st March 2015 till 2nd May 2015 only for English language version of the site.




The Wikipedia interest in Labour, Conservatives, and UKIP is highly aligned. Another tier consists of Liberal Democrats and SNP, both seem to be getting similar amount of page views. Greens have the lowest total volume of the main parties, with a marked peak on 1st April.

All parties experienced a boost in the traffic volume around the time of major TV debates (2nd, 16th, and 30th April 2015).

Page views of articles about political parties decline on weekends. The pattern is fairly consistent and can be observed in all parties.
Here is how it looks for Labour: