Mental Floss

Wikipedia’s 25 Most Popular Pages of 2023

Oppenheimer—the film and the person—were hot topics in 2023. So was cricket.

By Ellen Gutoskey

The encyclopedia salesperson's nemesis.
The encyclopedia salesperson's nemesis. / SOPA Images/GettyImages
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To some people, perusing a long Wikipedia page is one of life’s greatest pleasures. This year, millions of people did that with Oppenheimer—both the person and the blockbuster biopic he inspired.

As the Associated Press reports, the Wikipedia page for Oppenheimer the film garnered more than 28.3 million views this year, making it the fifth most visited Wikipedia page of 2023. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s page took the seventh spot with a little under 25.7 million views.

If there’s an overall MVP of the list, it’s probably cricket. Pages relating to the sport took four of the top 10 spots: the 2023 Cricket World Cup, the Indian Premier League, the Cricket World Cup, and the 2023 Indian Premier League. But even cricket couldn’t compete with the buzziest tech topic of 2023—artificial intelligence. ChatGPT came in first place, with a staggering 49.5 million page views.

The runner-up was the page for deaths in 2023, a list of all the notable people who died this year. Two of those late celebrities’ own pages were highly trafficked, too: Friends star Matthew Perry; and singer Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis Presley’s only child.

Oppenheimer wasn’t the only movie to make the list. So did its Barbenheimer counterpart, Barbie, as well as Avatar: The Way of Water, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and two Hindi-language action thrillers: Jawan and Pathaan.

The data was collected by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that keeps the lights on at Wikipedia, which is famously reader-funded. A couple caveats about the report: It only accounted for page views on English Wikipedia, not any of the other 330 or so versions of the site published in different languages. Also, the data cuts off at November 28, 2023; any page views between then and December 31 will get factored into an updated report, which the Wikimedia Foundation will release on January 3, 2024. In other words, you have less than a month to try to land your favorite niche Wikipedia page on the list.

See the top 25 most popular pages below, and find out more about the study here.

  1. ChatGPT // 49,490,406 
  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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