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| Historic Centre of Rome |
Wikipedia is the most common and possibly most trusted search option for people when looking up to something online. The same applies for the tourists as well.
In a recent analysis of Wikipedia page views found that “Paris – Banks of the Seine” and “Historic Centre of Rome” were the most popular out of more than 1,000 UNESCO World Heritage Sites being consulted on the free online encyclopedia. These were closely followed by the historic areas of Istanbul, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Statue of Liberty.
Interestingly, half of the twenty most popular UNESCO sites are located in the European Union.
While considering only the English Wikipedia, the Taj Mahal was the second most popular in terms of page views which were followed by , followed by the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China and Rome’s historic centre.
After in was launched in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to hold more than 40 million articles in more than 200 languages which eventually means that this could be potentially be a relevant source of big data for official statistics.
For this particular study, Wikipedia articles were selected for each of the 1,031 World Heritage Sites included on UNESCO’s list in 2015. Approximately 50,000 articles were selected across 31 languages and the total number of page views was used to measure the popularity.
The data analysis showed the Wikipedia articles relating to “Paris, Banks of the Seine” topped the chart with nearly 7 million views narrowly followed by historic centre of Rome, with nearly 6 million views.
