Wikipedia Announces the Most Popular Articles of 2024

Tuesday the Wikimedia Foundation released its annual list of the most-visited Wikipedia pages. (Scroll down to where it says 'The full top 25'...)

But while the top subjects seem to be politics and pop culture, CNN reports that in the end 'a list of deaths in 2024 was the most visited page, garnering over 44 million views.'

A page about deaths in a given year has ranked at the top of the list five times since 2015, when the Wikimedia Foundation began releasing the data. The topic has never fallen below third place on the list.
People also searched for U.S. political figures... [The #2, #3, #5, #7, and #9 most-visited pages were, respectively, for Kamala Harris, the 2024 United States presidential election, Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Project 2025.] While U.S. politics was a notable search subject, popular culture had the largest share of the top 25. The fourth most-visited page was about Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers who were sentenced to life in prison for the 1989 murder of their parents and are now facing a resentencing trial. The case received renewed public attention after a Netflix documentary was published this year. The Wikipedia page about the brothers received over 26 million views in 2024.

The 'Deadpool & Wolverine' and 'Dune: Part Two' movies were eighth and 23rd, respectively... [Other high-ranking pop-culture pages included Taylor Swift (#11)and the 2024 Summer Olympics (#14).]

'Wikipedia readers in India continue to make a big impact on the list, a trend we saw in 2023 as well,' Wikimedia Foundation's Alikhan said. The Indian Premier League, a cricket league in India, garnered over 24.5 million views this year as the site's sixth most visited page... [The 2024 Indian general election came in at #10]

Wikipedia's entry on ChatGPT came in at #12, while Elon Musk came in at #17.

'When people want to learn about our world — the good, bad, weird, and wild alike — they turn to Wikipedia,' explains the blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation, calling Wikipedia 'the largest knowledge resource ever assembled in the history of the world' and 'a reflection of all the people who live on our planet. its story is your story, your interests, your questions, and your curiosity.'
Other statistics about Wikipedia in 2024:

Nearly 3.5 billion bytes of information were added this year via over 31 million edits.
People spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours — nearly 275,000 years! — reading English Wikipedia in 2024, according to data from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.