Short answer
Somewhat. Parties' shares of Wikipedia views tracked their vote shares more closely than their shares of Facebook engagement did, but neither added much to knowing how they had done last time.
What the evidence shows
- The study compares Wikipedia pageviews and Facebook interactions for 112 parties in 17 countries from July 2015 to September 2020. Within country-months, the median rank correlation between parties' shares of the two was 0.50.
- Facebook interactions rose by about 160% in the month before an election; Wikipedia views roughly doubled in the month before and were almost five times their usual level in the election month.
- In 20 elections in 14 countries, Wikipedia shares correlated 0.84 with vote shares and Facebook shares 0.62, against 0.92 for the previous vote.
- Adding either measure to the previous result reduced the average out-of-sample error only from 4.0 points to 3.8 or 3.9.
Caveats
In Britain, a separate study found Facebook engagement, Wikipedia views and Google searches moved together only loosely, with no clear tendency for Facebook to come first.