We can all agree that 2020 was an unprecedented year. We had many environmental, political and health concerns throughout the year, and the pandemic changed our lives significantly. In this short article, I’ll try to explain why we feel like 2020 was a busy year, despite the lockdowns and the pandemic.
A lot has happened in 2020. This is best highlighted when we look at the events recorded on Wikipedia this year. On Wikipedia in each year’s article, a number of events are recorded by date that meets the requirements (relevancy, impact, etc). I collected this data for the last 50 years and it’s clear that we had a couple of very eventful years.
The below chart shows the number of events in each year and a 7 year moving average as well.
The number of events from 2002 to 2017 stagnated and were mostly below 70. From 2017 we had a huge increase in the number of events and in 2020 we had 270 events resulting in a 30 year record.
The busiest month in 2020 was April with 44 events, almost with as many events as we had in 2013, while the 10 year average was 6,5 for April.
It’s clear based on this data that 2020 was a very eventful year, and as we were trying to be caught up with the news, we rightfully judge 2020 as wild the least. Will things in 2021 return to “normal”? We can only guess and hope that 2021 will be less hectic.
Tools Used
- Python for scraping
- DataWrapper
