Yeah I don't know that much about WWI, I just recall getting very depressed when I first started learning about the reasons why we were there in college. Basically to make rich people richer, as always:-(.

At which point it has become the height of irony that the USA now is considering joining the neo-Nazis, in the next Presidential election:-(.

Okay so you got me curious so I took a look at the actual survey results, linked to from the article, and two things are somewhat noticable about Wilson to me.

One is that he is, as expected, on the list of the most Over-Rated Presidents. Kennedy, Reagan, Jackson, then Wilson, followed by Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, etc. So they do seem aware of these concerns, though ofc this doesn't explain why the ranking is so high, even though consistently falling over time.

The second is what is NOT as directly noticable: he is very much kinda average, neither thought of all that highly across the different categories (Republican rankings are originally separated from Democrat ones before everything gets combined) nor all that lowly either. I wonder if he is kinda just at an inflection point, where there are truly shitty ones and truly good ones (in the eyes of their detractors and proponents respectively ofc), but nobody seemed to have quite as strong opinions about him in particular (unlike e.g. Reagan or Kennedy), so he just kinda floats around in-between the others?

Even in terms of the Over-Rated listing (Table 7), the difference between Reagan (83) vs. Jefferson (40) is that twice as many respondents considered the former to be overrated compared to half that number saying so for the latter. While Wilson (60) was directly in between, average to the core just like in every other category he appears in.

Unsurprisingly, Wilson also made the list of the Most Polarizing Presidents (Table 4), but true to form, was at the very bottom of that list, and yet with a higher polarizing score than Clinton who was identified by a higher number of people as being polarizing, but apparently lesser in magnitude than Wilson. i.e. fewer people know as much about the bad things he did, but those who know are more highly motivated to think ill of him as a result.:-)

So like, to Republicans, they considered Wilson (13) to be just below Jackson (12) and above Kennedy (14, but he's of the opposite party affiliation!), while to Democrats Wilson (16) was just below Adams (15) yet above Monroe (17). So anyway, maybe Wilson is number 15 on the final list not bc he earned that place by being good, so much as being less offensive (somehow?) to all parties concerned than others who were considered much worse? i.e. he didn't "earn" that spot so much as he needed to go somewhere within the listing, and that ended up being it?

It's a possibility at any rate.