() – Are you looking for something? Wikipedia has become a source of information for millions of people around the world.
The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs the site, on Tuesday released its annual list of the most visited Wikipedia pages, showing what people wanted to read this year.
The popular encyclopedia offers a snapshot of the topics that captivate the public, become global trends or define a specific year, similar to the Oxford word of the year. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the English Wikipedia was consulted more than 76 billion times this year worldwide as of October.
“Wikipedia’s most popular articles are a reflection of our world, highlighting our collective interests at a single moment in time,” Anusha Alikhan, director of communications at the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement.
A list of deaths in 2024 was the most visited page, with more than 44 million views.
A page about deaths in a given year has ranked first on the list five times since 2015, when the Wikimedia Foundation began publishing the data. The topic has never dropped below third place on the list.
People also searched for US political figures, celebrities like Taylor Swift and popular American movies, as well as global sporting events and the general elections in India. ChatGPT, which was the most visited article in 2023, dropped in its ranking to the 12th most visited page.
Wikipedia’s most viewed pages in 2024 are largely related to popular culture and US politics.
Vice President Kamala Harris and the 2024 US presidential election ranked second and third on the list, with nearly 29 and 28 million views, respectively. And the 2020 presidential election was the 13th most visited page, with double the number of views in November.
President-elect Donald Trump is in fifth place. It has been on the list almost every year since 2015, dropping in 2022 and 2023 before reappearing this year. Vice President-elect JD Vance ranked seventh in the top ten.
Project 2025 also earned a spot in the top 10, in ninth place, with nearly 20 million views.
Also in the top 25: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a close Trump ally who was chosen to lead the next administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” President Joe Biden and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health secretary.
A page about Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor and former vice presidential candidate, did not appear in the top 25. But the data shows he would have been 27th if the list had been expanded.
While US politics was a notable search topic, popular culture had the majority of the top 25.
The fourth most visited page was about Lyle and Erik Menéndez, the brothers who were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of their parents in 1989 and who now face a resentencing trial. The case received renewed public attention after a Netflix documentary about them was released this year. The Wikipedia page about the brothers received over 26 million views in 2024.
The films “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Dune: Part Two” were the eighth and twenty-third, respectively. In 2023, the films “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” were in the top 25.
Griselda Blanco, a Colombian drug trafficker known as the “queen of cocaine,” saw a spike in views after a Netflix miniseries about her life was released this year, and her page received nearly 13.5 million views so far. throughout the year.
People also read about celebrities all year long. Swift ranked eleventh, down from the ninth most visited in 2023 when it first appeared on the list. The pop star completes his Eras Tour world tour on December 8th.
Sean “Diddy” Combs made the top 25, as the rapper and music producer faces more than 30 civil lawsuits including charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
And the page about Liam Payne, the One Direction musician who died on October 16, accumulated more than 12 million views. His death caused great sadness among fans, drawing crowds who gathered at vigils around the world to mourn the British pop icon.
Indian politics and culture were also among the top searches on Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia readers in India continue to have a huge impact on the list, a trend that we also saw in 2023”said Alikhan of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Indian Premier League, a cricket league in India, garnered more than 24.5 million views this year as the site’s sixth most visited page. The topic was the fourth most visited page in 2023, the first year it appeared on the list.
India’s general election also made the top 10. In June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was re-elected in the country’s general election. The election page saw a peak of 1.2 million views on June 4, when the voting results were announced, and gained more than 18 million views during the year.
The Bollywood film “Kalki 2898 AD” had 14.6 million views throughout the year, earning a spot in the top 25. In 2023, two Bollywood films appeared in the top 25 most viewed list.
The 2024 Summer Olympics, the UEFA Euro championship and Cristiano Ronaldo were also included in the top 25.
Wikipedia launched in 2001 and is maintained by more than 260,000 volunteer editors. There were more than 31 million edits to the site in 2024 and nearly 3.5 billion bytes of information were added, according to the Wikimedia Foundation.
The editors who compiled the list checked for spam, bots and other inaccuracies that could alter page view counts, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. The list used data collected on November 22, and the Wikimedia Foundation will update the final list in January.
The 25 most viewed Wikipedia pages of 2024, ordered by page views:
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