Top 25: Here are the most-read Wikipedia articles of the year
Eighty-four billion pageviews later, and we now know which Wikipedia articles were most popular this year.
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Eighty-four billion pageviews later, and we now know which Wikipedia articles were most popular this year.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, has released its annual list of most popular articles in the English language.
ChatGPT takes the top spot, with more than 49 million views. The article had between 100,000 and 400,000 views almost every single day in the first half of the year, and the interest wasn't confined to the English-language version of Wikipedia. Across all languages, ChatGPT picked up more than 79 million pageviews in total.
The second-most popular article was Wikipedia's annual list of deaths, which frequently makes an appearance in the most-viewed articles of each year. Individual deaths also spurred significant traffic on the site — the articles on Matthew Perry and Lisa Marie Presley were both in the top 25 most-viewed list.
Other celebrities also appear, including Taylor Swift and Elon Musk, at No. 12 and 19 in the rankings, respectively.
Meanwhile, several movies are among the most popular articles of the year. While Barbie trounced Oppenheimer at the box office, the latter was more popular on Wikipedia. More than 28 million people clicked on the article about the film, compared to 18 million who read the article on the Barbie movie.
Here's a look at the full list of 25 most-read Wikipedia articles of 2023:
And here's a look at the most-viewed articles over the past few years:
According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the pageviews for 2023 are as of Nov. 28. Final data for the year will be released on Jan. 3.