Wikipedia Releases Top 25 Most-Viewed pages of 2023

Wikipedia’s top 25 most viewed pages in 2023, released Tuesday, reflect the world’s interest in innovation in artificial intelligence, people who died this year and the growing power of Indian users to influence trends on the website.

Run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia has received more than 84 billion page views so far in 2023, according to data the foundation shared with CNN.

Given its massive surge in popularity, the page about OpenAI’s virtual chatbot ChatGPT was the most viewed page on Wikipedia this year, amassing more than 49.4 million page views. ChatGPT set a record for the fastest-growing user base this past February, amassing 100 million active users in January. Other tech companies have poured billions into developing rival generative AI technology. Related tech companies make semiconductor chips capable of powering future AI innovations and affect geopolitical relationships between the world’s largest superpowers.

“It’s clear that people wanted to better understand the history and the context behind ChatGPT’s technology as they experimented with it,” said Anusha Alikhan, chief communications officer at the Wikimedia Foundation in an interview with CNN.

Alikhan added that ChatGPT is also trained using Wikipedia data, using Wikimedia projects to answer users’ questions or prompts. Wikipedia data and text, which is compiled by human users and editors, play a role in the responses that the chatbot produces to its users.

“Wikipedia plays an essential role in training almost every large language model,” said Alikhan.

She added that because of the foundation’s nonprofit status, they do not charge OpenAi for the use of its content. It’s also the same reason why the company doesn’t have advertisements or track users’ private information.

Joining ChatGPT in the rest of the top five were biographical posts about people who died in 2023, the 2023 Cricket World Cup, the Indian Premier League, which is a Cricket league, and the movie “Oppenheimer.”

India and Southeast Asian audiences made a big impact on 2023’s list, as a fifth of the list consisted of media from that region and the country of India itself.

“Right now we have about 4,700 active English Wikipedia volunteer editors in India,” said Alikhan. “That total puts them behind only the United States and the United Kingdom. India has… a rich media environment and information technology sector.”

Given that India is likely to overtake China as the most populated country in the world, with a population estimated to reach 1.43 billion by the end of the year according to the United Nations, its influence on global media isn’t surprising. China’s government bans Wikipedia from the country’s internet.

According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market data analytics firm Kantar, the number of active internet users in India is expected to grow to 900 million from 759 million currently.

The Oppenheimer film received more than 28 million page views, the page about real-life physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer himself received 25.6 million views while the Barbie film received 18 million.

The list was otherwise filled with influential figures in sports, entertainment and business. Taylor Swift, Elon Musk and Lionel Messi are top news-makers within their respective crafts and that showed in the number of times their pages were viewed on Wikipedia.

A full list of pages, by rank and number of page views is available below.

1. ChatGPT, 49,490,406 page views

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