Sudden Attention Shifts on Wikipedia During the COVID-19 Crisis

We study how the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the severe mobility restrictions that ensued, has impacted information access on Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia. A longitudinal analysis that combines pageview statistics for 12 \WP language editions with mobility reports published by Apple and Google reveals massive shifts in the \emph{volume} and the \emph{nature} of information seeking patterns amidst the pandemic. Interestingly, while we observe a transient increase in Wikipedia's pageview volume following mobility restrictions, the nature of information sought was impacted more permanently. These changes are most pronounced for language editions associated with countries in which the most severe mobility restrictions were implemented. We also find that articles belonging to different topics behaved differently; \eg, attention towards entertainment\hyp related topics is lingering and even increasing, while the interest in health\hyp and biology\hyp related topics was either small or transient. Our results highlight the utility of \WP for studying how the pandemic affected people's needs, interests, and concerns.