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ocial media, nationalism, and sports were the most frequently searched topics on Indonesian Wikipedia last year.

A page about Facebook was the second-most read article with 1,364,585 views, while a page on video-sharing website YouTube came in at fourth place with 994,494 views.

Together, these social media-related pages were viewed 2.35 million times.

Meanwhile, an article entitled “Proklamasi Kemerdekaan Indonesia” (Declaration of Independence) was at seventh place, and “Sejarah Indonesia” (History of Indonesia) came in at ninth place.

All the three articles related to nationalism have been viewed 2.1 million times.

Soccer, volleyball, and basketball, came in at fifth, sixth, and eighth place, respectively. The three articles altogether have been viewed 1.76 million times.

On December 2012, Internet users viewed 70.3 million pages on free Internet encyclopedia. Wikipedia Indonesia is in 17th place in terms of number of users, out of 279 other languages.

“The numbers show how thirsty Indonesians are for free information,” the chair of Wikipedia Indonesia, Siska Doviana, told The Jakarta Post.

Siska said that 212,909 articles had been written until recently, while 40 volunteers have edited articles on the website 64 million times.

She said that although the volunteers are few in number, they have significantly contributed to the liberation of knowledge.

She said that the local chapter will hold writing classes this year in several languages: Indonesian, Banjarnese, Balinese, and Javanese.

“The classes will be held routinely in Jakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, Bali, and Banjarmasin,” she said.

Albertus Aditya, one active volunteer, said that many people were reading about social media because information could not otherwise be found all in one place.

“I think that many people want to learn new things,” he said.

Albertus, a high school student, said that he accessed Indonesian Wikipedia for the first time when he was in junior high in 2007. He said that he stumbled on the online encyclopedia while searching for information related to an assignment about Soekarno.

He said that he found a mistake and a lack of information in an article so he searched for a way to improve the article.

“At that time, I thought that it would be better if someone corrected my work. Not everyone was able to spot the mistakes and that made me interested in editing articles,” he said.