No sticky wickets here: The top 5 Wikipedia articles for 2023 may surprise you
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
No doubt one of Wikipedia’s key features — public editing — and the sometimes spurious contributions that flow through that access has helped make it a favorite punchline in a legion of jokes and jabs. But it’s grown into an information leviathan since launching in 2001 and finds itself regularly among the top 5 most visited websites in the world — drawing over 84 billion views so far this year according to its non-profit operator, the Wikimedia Foundation.
And while its become common practice to absorb Wikipedia content with an appropriate touch of salt, parsing traffic on the platform is one intriguing method for measuring the prevailing winds of public interest.
This year, an English Wikipedia article about the generative artificial intelligence phenomena that is ChatGPT easily outpaced all other topics on the site, drawing nearly 50 million views. While the inquiry-based, AI-driven chatbot celebrated its one-year anniversary just a week ago, earlier this year the ChatGPT Wikipedia entry was generating massive levels of daily traffic.
“The English Wikipedia article carried a remarkably consistent level of attention throughout the first half of the year,” the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in a Tuesday blog post. “Its pageviews ranged between 100,000 and 400,000 nearly every day. In fact, across all of the languages Wikipedia supports, we registered over 78 million page views to ChatGPT articles.”
Related
Recent turbulence surrounding the ousting, then reinstatement, of ChatGPT co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, has helped keep the platform in the news and its easily the most popular generative artificial intelligence tool, reportedly attracting 180 million account holders so far and over 100 million weekly users.
Number two on Wikipedia’s 2023 hit list, with nearly 43 million views, is a perennial category that captures the deaths of notable persons, broken down into monthly segments that list individual passings with short biographical excerpts.
The traffic generated by ChatGPT’s runaway popularity and internet users’ collective morbid curiosity may seem apropos of the site, but the No. 3 and No. 4 top Wikipedia articles for 2023 took Wikipedia operators by surprise.
Articles on the 2023 Cricket World Cup and the Indian Premier League cricket organization drew 38 million and 32 million views, respectively, in 2023. The popularity of the entries left Wikipedia operators gobsmacked, as no other cricket-centric topics have appeared on the site’s year-end most popular articles lists since they began doing the calculations in 2015.
“In 2023, cricket comprised a full 16% of English Wikipedia’s top 25 articles,” Wikimedia’s blog post reads. “The third most-viewed article in our annual list is about the 2023 Cricket World Cup, which received 304% more interest this year vs. its last edition. That included over 1.25 million views on the day of the tournament final.”
Australia won the 2023 edition of the Cricket World Cup champion, with India placing second in the tournament. India cricketer Virat Kohli was awarded Player of the Tournament and, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, he received more page views on Wikipedia this year, over 10 million, than all those recorded for the 2019 Cricket World Cup that year, which drew just under 9.5 million views.
Rounding out Wikipedia’s top five entries for 2023 was an article about the Hollywood blockbuster Oppenheimer, a biographical film about the “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and directed by five-time Academy Award nominee Christopher Nolan.
The Wikipedia article on the Oppenheimer film drew over 28 million views and drove interest in a related biographical article on Oppenheimer, which grabbed the No. 7 spot on the year-end list with almost 26 million views.
And, interest in the Oppenheimer film article bested traffic for an entry on another big cinema hit from 2023.
“For a good number of people, ‘Barbenheimer’ hype was the story of the middle of 2023,” the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in its blog post. “While Barbie may have outpaced Oppenheimer‘s global box office total by around 50%, Oppenheimer reigned supreme on English Wikipedia with about 57% more page views.”
Here are English Wikipedia’s top 25 most popular articles for 2023, based on page views:
ChatGPT, 49,490,406 pageviews.
Deaths in 2023, 42,666,860.
2023 Cricket World Cup, 38,171,653.
Indian Premier League, 32,012,810.
Oppenheimer (film), 28,348,248.
Cricket World Cup, 25,961,417.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, 25,672,469.
Jawan (film), 21,791,126.
2023 Indian Premier League, 20,694,974.
Pathaan (film), 19,932,509.
The Last of Us (TV series), 19,791,789.
Taylor Swift, 19,418,385.
Barbie (film), 18,051,077.
Cristiano Ronaldo, 17,492,537.
Lionel Messi, 16,623,630.
Premier League, 16,604,669.
Matthew Perry, 16,454,666.
United States, 16,240,461.
Elon Musk, 14,370,395.
Avatar: The Way of Water, 14,303,116.
India, 13,850,178.
Lisa Marie Presley, 13,764,007.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 13,392,917.
Russian invasion of Ukraine, 12,798,866.
Andrew Tate, 12,728,616.
