He Was Short. His Wikipedia Page Is Not.

Napoleon Bonaparte did a lot, but he didn’t quite do it all. He did not, for example, fire a bunch of cannons at the Egyptian pyramids. Does it matter that Ridley Scott’s Napoleon includes a scene of French armies attacking million-ton, completely inanimate structures of stone? Or that the Battle of Austerlitz scene focuses on a frozen pond incident that, in reality, occurred long after the battle was won?

Ridley Scott admitted he doesn’t know if Napoleon’s armies shot cannons at pyramids and that the scene was merely “a fast”—and loose, I might add—“way of saying he took Egypt.” His response to the critics was a swift “Get a life.” In another interview, he stated that “fucking historians” don’t truly know about Napoleonic Europe because “they weren’t there.”

Scott’s fact-agnostic attitude toward Napoleon, one of the most documented humans to ever walk the planet, hasn’t gone unnoticed. History-minded reviewers have pointed out the inaccuracies littered throughout the 2-hour-and-38-minute flick. If you’re looking to get a crystal-clear portrait of the French emperor, you may want to supplement your movie night with some additional reading—like one of the bazillion books about Napoleon, or more conveniently, the famed ruler’s sprawling Wikipedia page.

Napoleon’s main article is nearly 20,000 words, cleanly divided into sections such as Appearance and The Invasion of Russia (the latter will inform you that Napoleon almost certainly did not say “I must begin my march to Moscow,” like his character did in the film, since he didn’t think he’d have to go so far into Russia). Wikipedia has additional entries dedicated to his tomb, legacy, penchant for art looting, and more. Le petit caporal even has a stand-alone article on his genitals (only Jesus and Hitler can say the same).

When it comes to films that dance on the line between fantasy and reality, the post-movie Wikipedia dive is a sacred online ritual. You sit next to your partner or pal and simultaneously scroll through historical synopses, occasionally piercing the silence with new-to-you info like “Napoleon was frenemies with Beethoven!” or “People think he had a body-odor fetish but he probably didn’t!” as you sort creative liberties from historical canon.

I know for a fact that I’m not the only one fond of pairing entertainment with light research. When Sony Pictures released the Napoleon trailer on July 10, Wikipedia traffic for the long-dead leader skyrocketed to third place on the daily list of most-viewed articles, beating out popular entries like “Sex” and “ChatGPT.” And that was just the trailer!

Even from the grave, Napoleon is dominating new (online) worlds. As the release date approached, traffic to Napoleon topics climbed steadily, surpassing contemporary figures like Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Beyoncé—all before it was even released. Even the article about bicorne hats, Bonaparte’s headwear of choice, is at its highest traffic in recorded history.

Unlike the encyclopedias of yore, Wikipedia shows which entries people are looking up—and which ones nobody is reading (a tireless study by an admin named Colin Morris revealed that many of the least-trafficked articles are on obscure moth species). Without fail, the box office, particularly for “based on true events” flicks, drives hordes of Wikipedia traffic. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s article got 100 times more pageviews in July than “Vagina,” a shocking achievement considering Vagina’s consistently strong performance on the Wikipedia charts (it averages more views than “God”).

During the week of July 23, 16 of the Top 25 articles in English Wikipedia were directly related to Barbenheimer. Last month, following Netflix’s Beckham, David Beckham made the Top 5; during the heights of the Tinder Swindler, Simon Leviev’s article breached the Top 3; Blonde carried Marilyn Monroe to the Top 5; Pamela Anderson hogged the top charts after the Pam & Tommy miniseries. Whether or not film adaptations of history win over the Academy, they consistently clean up on Wikipedia. In the monthlong buildup to the Napoleon movie’s release, Napoleon’s penis alone got more traffic than articles like “Electromagnetism” and the list of Pacific islands.

No one knows film-driven Wikipedia traffic more keenly than Igor, a volunteer whose user page starts with “Hello, I’m Brazilian, have a lot of free time and a will to learn things.” I adore his ardent write-ups of the encyclopedia charts, which are really thinly veiled cultural criticism. Each week since 2017, he has dutifully explained why each of the Top 25 articles are trending, answering the question no one was asking: How is the documentary du jour affecting the encyclopedia?

He recaps pageview trends with no less fervor than an NBA sportscaster during Game 7: In 2022, when Inventing Anna was dominating Netflix, he called fraudster Anna Sorokin “the only thing preventing a top-ten monopoly of the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis.” During Anna Sorokin’s second week in the charts, Igor criticized the “salacious, tabloid-esque ‘true story’ limited series that are all the rage these days” and stated “you’d never catch me watching it” (he caved just four write-ups later). “Netflix has too much of a pull on people,” he proclaimed in the second of five straight weeks that Jeffrey Dahmer occupied the No. 1 spot (Dahmer achieved Wikipedia’s second-highest all-time weekly viewership).

In a 2018 Nielsen poll, 45 percent of adults responded that they used a second screen “very often” or “always” when watching TV, and in a blog post, Wikipedia called itself a “second-screen experience.” In the five years since then, the line between encyclopedia and entertainment has only gotten blurrier. But it’s not invisible. Wikipedia shouldn’t sacrifice its meticulousness for movie magic, nor should movie scripts adopt the dry, info dump-y quality of an encyclopedia—commentators have made the latter point abundantly clear.

Film critics deride the dense dramas and documentaries with overly stiff adherence to the historical record—storytelling that’s more didactic than artful, more concerned with detail than drama. The New Yorker called Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis movie “a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article” and IndieWire dubbed the Whitney Houston biopic a “Wikipedia page set to song,” panning the “abject laziness of the film’s construction.” The New York Times diminished Solo: A Star Wars Story to a “filmed Wikipedia page.” Netflix’s Pelé movie “contains nothing you couldn’t get from Wikipedia,” and the doc on Joyce Carol Oates is just a “glorified Wikipedia article.” The critics are clear that an encyclopedia is no replacement for a movie: Films may prompt a Wikipedia binge but they should not be the Wikipedia binge.

Reviewers raise this comparison as a critique of moviemakers, but I can’t help but interpret the sentiment as a sneaky salute to Wikipedia. What an achievement for a humble encyclopedia, written by literal randos, to bear any sort of resemblance to big-budget entertainment. Slowly but surely, the once scrappy Wikipedia project has graduated into the go-to metaphor for no-frills factfulness.

Richard Brody clearly spelled out his praise in the New Yorker review of Oppenheimer: Wikipedia’s “simple fact-heavy article” offered “more complexity and more enticing detail than Nolan’s script,” he wrote. Wikipedians everywhere blushed with pride.