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Announcing English Wikipedia’s most popular articles of 2024

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Politics, sports, and movies lead the 25 most-read articles.

When people want to learn about our world—the good, bad, weird, and wild alike—they turn to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the largest knowledge resource ever assembled in the history of the world. Its content is a reflection of all the people who live on our planet—its story is your story, your interests, your questions, and your curiosity.

That’s why people spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours—nearly 275,000 years!—reading English Wikipedia in 2024, according to data from the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates the website and its sister projects. During those long hours, English Wikipedia’s volunteer editors continued updating the site: nearly 3.5 billion bytes of information were added this year via over 31 million edits.

But some topics on Wikipedia fascinated you all more than most. These are English Wikipedia’s 25 most popular articles of 2024. You can also check out our dedicated 2024 Year in Review webpage.

The most popular article of 2024 belongs to a topic that has been at the top of Wikipedia’s most-read articles five times since we began sharing these lists in 2015: “Deaths in 2024”. In fact, in that time period, it has never been lower than third place. 

Wikipedia’s volunteer editors update this article when they find published obituaries that come out after the deaths of notable individuals—specifically, “notable” according to Wikipedia’s definition of the word. With eight billion people in the world, there are a large number of notable deaths to update the page with each day.1 One of those deaths was Liam Payne, whose own article hit #25 after his untimely death.

Scroll down to learn more about the other top articles, and you can find the full list featured at the bottom.

1 While Wikipedia’s strict privacy policy means that we don’t have the number of repeat visitors to the “Deaths in 2024” page, our assumption is that a good portion of these views are regular and returning readers that come to read those updates. At the end of each month, Wikipedia’s volunteers split the article into smaller month-by-month lists, which keeps its length to a readable size. As of publishing time, the page covers December 2024—but if you’re reading it in January 2025, the page will be redirected to Wikipedia’s “Lists of deaths by year.”

Comprising 10 of the top 25 articles, the primary theme of this year’s most-popular Wikipedia articles is politics in the US and India. Views from these two countries made up nearly half of English Wikipedia’s total pageviews this year. 

In the US, the federal election was held early last month. The candidates included the Republican Party’s Donald Trump and JD Vance for president and vice president, respectively, and the Democratic Party’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Three of the four appear on this list, and Walz would have been included if we extended it to #27.

Data from the Wikimedia Foundation showed a surge of views going to articles about US politics around Election Day (5 November): about 4.2 million viewed the 2024 presidential election article on that specific day, and the 2020 presidential election article more than doubled its views in November.

Meanwhile, India’s general election was held from April to June. Narendra Modi was reelected as prime minister for a third term. Wikipedia’s article about the election is the work of nearly 900 individual volunteers making over 6,700 edits. It saw a peak of 1.2 million views on 4 June, the day the results were announced, as people rushed to look up who had won.

People 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.

This effect is most obvious when it involves real-life topics depicted on TV, and 2024 is no different. Over 26 million views came to Wikipedia’s article on Lyle and Erik Menendez, two brothers who were convicted of the 1989 murders of their parents. Their story was the subject of a nine-episode crime drama series and an associated documentary film released on Netflix. Griselda Blanco, a Colombian drug lord with a prominent role in Miami’s 1980s drug war, also found a place on the list. Her life was spotlighted in a well-reviewed Netflix miniseries this year, and views to her article peaked to over one million shortly after its release.

Over in Hollywood, this year’s star is Deadpool & Wolverine, the comedy-action flick starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. The film appears to have connected strongly with audiences, particularly for its heavy use of nostalgia inspired by past superhero films and comic books. It would not surprise us if part of this Wikipedia article’s popularity came from people looking up actor and character names for Deadpool & Wolverine‘s flood of resurrected characters and cameo appearances. 

In pop culture, singer-songwriter Taylor Swift is #11 on the list; her Eras Tour has its 149th and final show on 8 December. The tour is the highest-grossing of all time and has had cultural, economic and sociopolitical impacts on many of the countries it has journeyed to. Also appearing on the list is Kalki 2898 AD, the first installment of a new Bollywood cinematic universe that is also the most expensive Indian film ever made; and Dune: Part Two, the conclusion of Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of an acclaimed science-fiction novel.

Cricket and football—or “soccer” for the US-based folks reading this—fill out most of the sporting articles in this year’s top 25. 

In cricket, we are looking at the Indian Premier League. The article received the majority of its views during the 2024 season, which concluded with the Kolkata Knight Riders winning their third title in front of a crowd of 38,000 people. Cricket articles about the Premier League appeared on the list of most-popular Wikipedia articles for the first time last year, and if we had extended the list to #26 this year, the league’s 2024 season would have been on it.

On the football (soccer) side of things, megastar Cristiano Ronaldo makes his fifth appearance in the top 25. Competitor Lionel Messi would have appeared only if we extended this list to 48 entries.

The famed 2024 UEFA European Football Championship, better known as UEFA Euro 2024, also appears after a final that saw Spain fend off England. The victory gave Spain its fourth-ever European Championship, making it the most successful team of all time in that tournament. This article is #15 across the globe this year, but in the UK alone it features in the top five.Finally, the quadrennial Summer Olympics were held in Paris this year. The sporting tournament featured nearly 10,000 athletes from 204 nations, and their competitions were broadcast around the world. Gymnast Simone Biles was the most-read-about individual Olympic athlete on Wikipedia with an article that garnered over 10 million views.

The full top 25

For a more in-depth look across a planet’s worth of Wikipedia reading over 2024, please see our dedicated webpage.

  1. Deaths in 2024, 44,440,344 pageviews
  2. Kamala Harris, 28,960,278
  3. 2024 United States presidential election, 27,910,346
  4. Lyle and Erik Menendez, 26,126,811
  5. Donald Trump, 25,293,855
  6. Indian Premier League, 24,560,689
  7. JD Vance, 23,303,160
  8. Deadpool & Wolverine, 22,362,102
  9. Project 2025, 19,741,623
  10. 2024 Indian general election, 18,149,666
  11. Taylor Swift, 17,089,827
  12. ChatGPT, 16,595,350
  13. 2020 United States presidential election, 16,351,730
  14. 2024 Summer Olympics, 16,061,381
  15. UEFA Euro 2024, 15,680,913
  16. United States, 15,657,243
  17. Elon Musk, 15,535,053
  18. Kalki 2898 AD, 14,588,383
  19. Joe Biden, 14,536,522
  20. Cristiano Ronaldo, 13,698,372
  21. Griselda Blanco, 13,491,792
  22. Sean Combs, 13,112,437
  23. Dune: Part Two, 12,788,834
  24. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 12,375,410
  25. Liam Payne, 12,087,141

Wikipedia allows anyone who wants to learn about the world to consult a free online encyclopedia built from reliable sources—news, research, books—and presented from a neutral point of view. Every Wikipedia article is created, curated, and maintained by a global community of nearly 260,000 volunteers—people just like you. It is their work and time that has made Wikipedia into the reliable, trusted resource we all rely on.

Moreover, Wikipedia is the only top global website run by a nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation. It is primarily funded by millions of readers, which supports its independent model. Wikipedia content embraces standards of verifiability, neutrality and transparency. Its mission is to sustain free knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, ensuring these resources remain accessible and valuable for billions of people around the world.

If you’re curious to learn more about how Wikipedia works, check out the video below.

Written by Ed Erhart, Communications Specialist at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Appendix

  • This list was originally published using English Wikipedia data pulled by the Wikimedia Foundation on 22 November 2024. Please check back in early January 2025 for an update that will cover the remainder of the year. All of the pageviews include direct and indirect navigations to the pages in question.
  • This list has been screened for false positives with methods including:
    • Cross-referencing the pageviews against the percentage of views they received from desktop devices, as extreme values of less than 2% or more than 80% correlates strongly with spam, botnets, or other concerns. This affected articles like Cleopatra, a long-time false positive that @depthsofwiki reported is a default voice search on Google devices; XXXTentacion; and .xxx.
    • Looking at the number of pageviews that did not have a referrer and removing articles with extremely high values. This impacted a number of articles about large websites, such as Facebook. We suspect that a significant number of the pageviews without referrers are mistakes that occur when viewers are trying to access those websites.
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Wikipedia edit-a-thon Art+Feminism at the Royal Armoury in Stockholm

Jens Mohr