Wikipedia generated over 76 billion page views in 2024. In the weeks ahead of the November election, a disproportionate share went to candidate articles in the United States.
Across the seven most competitive Senate races, non-incumbent candidates averaged over 546,000 pageviews through election day, with roughly 23% of total traffic arriving in the final 30 days alone. In competitive House races, the average candidate article drew over 15,000 views in that same window.
Those numbers matter beyond Wikipedia itself. The platform feeds Google’s Knowledge Graph, populates AI training datasets used by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and even Grok. They also function as a routine background source for journalists. A candidate’s Wikipedia article is, in practice, the most widely read third-party account of that candidate’s identity.
But most campaigns treated Wikipedia as an afterthought.
In several close races, candidate articles carried outdated or politically damaging framing that went unaddressed, while opponents actively shaped their own coverage:
- Mondaire Jones’ article received nearly 150,000 views while still prominently featuring his support for defunding the police, a position he had publicly abandoned.
- The first detail included in Matt Cartwright’s article described him as a member of the Progressive Caucus, while he lost reelection in a purple district won by President Trump.
The gap between campaigns that managed their Wikipedia presence and those that ignored it was, in multiple cases, larger than the margin of defeat.