Ice Bucket Challenge Raises ALS Awareness Around the World

Over the past few weeks, everybody who uses social media has surely seen at least one video of someone dropping a bucket of iced water on themselves as part of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. The goal of the campaign was not only to get people to donate for ALS research, but also to raise awareness for the illness itself.

To find out whether the campaign succeeded, we at Statista used a tool that tracks Wikipedia page views to find out, whether the challenge brought more people to look up ALS on Wikipedia in different languages.

As it turns out the effect was huge: Between January 2013 and July 2014, the ALS article in the English Wikipedia was viewed 163,300 times per month on average. In August 2014, it was viewed 2.89 million times. That’s an 18-fold increase, which is consistent with the increase that could be observed in other Wikipedia versions.