The Rise of Mobile Wikipedia

August 2021

In April 2017 the government of Turkey blocked all access to Wikipedia. The block lasted almost three years until it was finally lifted on January 15th, 2020.

During this time traffic to Turkish Wikipedia went down significantly, but not completely:

Each vertical bar above represents a month of page views, segmented by access method: traffic from desktop/laptop browsers, mobile browsers, and the Wikipedia mobile app.

We can make each vertical bar the same height to reveal how the composition of traffic changed over time:

Desktop traffic share increased significantly while Wikipedia was blocked, probably since the block could be circumvented more easily on desktops and laptops than it could on phones.

Many other Wikipedias have been steadily increasing their share of mobile views over time. Here's the same chart for English, showing uninterrupted progress even during the pandemic:

To see more clearly how Turkish and English Wikipedia traffic shares compare to each other we can look directly at divergences in their traffic composition.

The charts below treat English Wikipedia as a baseline (1×) and show the deviation of Turkish desktop/mobile share from that baseline:

Each bar represents a month of page views, with time on the x axis and charts side-by-side to make comparisons easier. The colored areas above the horizontal line mark those times when Turkish Wikipedia had relatively more of that kind of traffic than English Wikipedia.

We can see that Turkish desktop view share was higher than English during the block, though it otherwise has a higher share of mobile traffic. As soon as the block was lifted, the Wikipedia app experienced a big boost in popularity, which has since been outpaced by app usage in English Wikipedia.

Explore the same visualizations for the most popular 180 Wikipedia projects below: