Screenshot: start of the French Wikipedia article on Gabriel Attal
There’s nothing like an important event or surprising news for Wikipedia to experience additions and translations at an accelerated pace: we saw this for example with the appointment of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in October 2022 (we passed in three days of articles on him in the free encyclopedia from 57 to 89 languages – now, 118 languages) or the death of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in March 2018. Emmanuel Macron’s choice as Prime Minister of Gabriel Attal, the youngest tenant de Matignon (34 years old), produced a comparable ripple effect. The ex-minister had an article in French and English in Wikipedia since June 2017, when he became a member of the Macronist party.
An article viewed more than 2 million times in five days
Upon his appointment on Tuesday January 9 around noon, the new Prime Minister was the subject of an article in 13 languages. Two hours later, 8 additional versions had been created, and 6 more languages in the next two hours. In the evening at midnight, there were 35 languages, and on January 13 in the middle of the day, there were 43.
If we want to compare with her predecessors under Emmanuel Macron’s two mandates, Elisabeth Borne has an article in 55 languages, Jean Castex in 62 languages and Edouard Philippe in 61 languages. Among the other Prime Ministers of the Fifth Republic, those who have the least internationalized article are Maurice Couve de Murville (33 languages), Michel Debré and Pierre Bérégovoy (36 languages each). The most processed is, after future presidents Jacques Chirac (127 languages) and Georges Pompidou (129 languages), François Fillon (74 languages).
The number of visits to the article in French on the new head of government has made a logical leap: while in the previous days it was more around 2,000 to 4,000 daily consultations, over the last five days the article “Gabriel Attal” has been viewed more than two million times, with a peak of 1.128 million page views on Tuesday January 9, the day of his appointment.
In English, attendance is lower, with more than 700,000 page views from January 8 to 12, with a peak again on January 9, at 398,000.
We note that the most unexpected appointment to the government on January 11, that of Sarkozy’s former Minister of Culture Rachida Dati, sparked an influx on her article in French, viewed 337,000 times in total on Thursday and Friday. The former Minister of Justice has an article in 33 languages in Wikipedia, far ahead of his colleagues Bruno Le Maire and Gérald Darmanin, both with 23 languages.
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