Wikipedia’s yearly most-read list is the equivalent of checking out your friend’s search history. It’s a window that lets you see what the world, or at least the English-speaking population, really cares about. Or at least cares about enough to type it into Google.
The Wikimedia Foundation recently released 2024’s top 25 most popular articles on English Wikipedia, revealing that the public was obsessed with death, politics, movies, and sports. Unsurprisingly, since we’re all going to bite the dust one day, “Deaths in 2024” was the most-read page of the year. The page summarizes the deaths of notable individuals by month and day in 2024.
Interestingly, pages on deaths in the year have made frequent appearances on Wikipedia’s yearly most-read list, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. The page has appeared in the top 25 five times since Wikipedia first began publishing the list in 2015. It has never been lower than third place.
“With eight billion people in the world, there are a large number of notable deaths to update the page with each day. One of those deaths was Liam Payne, whose own article hit #25 after his untimely death,” the Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement.
Wikipedia’s Top 25 Most-Read Articles of 2024
Besides notable deaths, politics was also a big theme of Wikipedia’s 2024 most-read list. Ten of the 25 articles are related to politics in the U.S. and India, which both held important elections this year. Consequently, pages for President-elect Donald Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, made the list, as did pages for Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden.
That being said, you can’t mention Trump without mentioning his “first buddy,” billionaire Elon Musk, who also made the list. Given Musk’s other ventures, including Tesla and SpaceX, it stands to reason that people reading his Wikipedia page weren’t just there for political reasons.
Another topic of interest was movies. As explained by the Wikimedia Foundation, “[p]eople love to use Wikipedia to search for background information of the film and television that has either just been released or that they are consuming at the time. This behavior even has a name: the second screen.”
Some examples include the massive interest in the Wikipedia page on Lyle and Erik Menendez, two brothers who were convicted with the murder of their parents in 1989. The case was the subject of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, a Netflix series released in September.
Another example is the interest in Griselda Blanco, a Colombian drug lord who gained notoriety for her role in Miami’s drug war in the 1980s. Some may remember her for the Netflix series Griselda, where she was interpreted by Sofía Vergara.
You can check out the full list below.
- Deaths in 2024 - 44,440,344 pageviews
- Kamala Harris - 28,960,278
- 2024 United States presidential election - 27,910,346
- Lyle and Erik Menendez - 26,126,811
- Donald Trump - 25,293,855
- Indian Premier League - 24,560,689
- JD Vance - 23,303,160
- Deadpool & Wolverine - 22,362,102
- Project 2025 - 19,741,623
- 2024 Indian general election - 18,149,666
- Taylor Swift - 17,089,827
- ChatGPT - 16,595,350
- 2020 United States presidential election - 16,351,730
- 2024 Summer Olympics - 16,061,381
- UEFA Euro 2024 - 15,680,913
- United States - 15,657,243
- Elon Musk - 15,535,053
- Kalki 2898 AD - 14,588,383
- Joe Biden - 14,536,522
- Cristiano Ronaldo - 13,698,372
- Griselda Blanco - 13,491,792
- Sean Combs - 13,112,437
- Dune: Part Two - 12,788,834
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - 12,375,410
- Liam Payne - 12,087,141
Image | Xataka On
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