What did you explore for on Wikipedia this year?
You may not be surprised to learn that according to the site’s annual round-up of its most-viewed pages, top of the list is its article on ChatGPT, with 49.5 million page views. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last year, you’ll know that ChatGPT is the AI-powered chatbot that took the world by storm following its release by OpenAI in November last year.
Wikipedia noted that page views for ChatGPT on the English-language version of the online encyclopedia ranged between 100,000 and 400,000 nearly every day in the first half of 2023. Across all of the languages that Wikipedia supports, its main ChatGPT article registered more than 78 million page views.
Second place in Wikipedia’s list is the article titled, “Deaths in 2023,” with 42.7 million views. This page regularly ranks high on Wikipedia’s end-of-year chart as curious folks look to see which famous people recently departed.
In third position we find a sport that enjoys pockets of intense popularity in various parts of the world, including India, Pakistan, England, and Australia, but which leaves most Americans somewhat befuddled. We’re talking cricket! With 38.2 million views, Wikipedia’s third most popular article of this year is “2023 Cricket World Cup,” which this time around took place in India.
The same sport also places fourth with 32 million views, but “Indian Premier League” focuses on the cricket league rather than the World Cup.
And in fifth position is the movie Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s epic about the man who helped create the atomic bomb, changing the course of history in the process. Wikipedia’s entry for the movie notched up 28.4 million views.
Finally, here’s Wikipedia’s list of the 25 most popular articles on its English-language site for 2023, based on page views. Note how some subjects pull in similar ones, for example, “Oppenheimer (film)” helped to boost page views for the Wikipedia article titled, “J. Robert Oppenheimer,” which placed 7th with 25.7 million views.
1. ChatGPT, 49,490,406 pageviews
2. Deaths in 2023, 42,666,860
3. 2023 Cricket World Cup, 38,171,653
4. Indian Premier League, 32,012,810
5. Oppenheimer (film), 28,348,248
6. Cricket World Cup, 25,961,417
7. J. Robert Oppenheimer, 25,672,469
8. Jawan (film), 21,791,126
9. 2023 Indian Premier League, 20,694,974
10. Pathaan (film), 19,932,509
11. The Last of Us (TV series), 19,791,789
12. Taylor Swift, 19,418,385
13. Barbie (film), 18,051,077
14. Cristiano Ronaldo, 17,492,537
15. Lionel Messi, 16,623,630
16. Premier League, 16,604,669
17. Matthew Perry, 16,454,666
18. United States, 16,240,461
19. Elon Musk, 14,370,395
20. Avatar: The Way of Water, 14,303,116
21. India, 13,850,178
22. Lisa Marie Presley, 13,764,007
23. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 13,392,917
24. Russian invasion of Ukraine, 12,798,866
25. Andrew Tate, 12,728,616
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