Wikipedia will mark its 25th anniversary on January 15, 2026. No one could have predicted 25 years ago that Wikipedia would grow into the backbone of knowledge on the internet it is today—powering search engines, voice assistants, and generative AI tools.
Today, nearly 250,000 volunteers generously give their time and energy to update Wikipedia, add citations, build consensus, and more. They keep knowledge human. In 2025, people spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours reading English Wikipedia articles, according to data from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. The top 20 most-read English Wikipedia articles of 2025 outlined below focus on politics, popular culture, and loss.
You can also check out our dedicated Year in Review webpage to dig deeper into data about Wikipedia.
- #1: Charlie Kirk
- #2: Deaths in 2025
- #3: Ed Gein
- #4: Donald Trump
- #5: Pope Leo XIV
The most-read article on English Wikipedia this year covered Charlie Kirk, a US political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality who was assassinated in September at a university campus debate he organized. In the day afterwards, people viewed the article about Kirk nearly 15 million times, or an average of over 170 times per second. Across 2025, about 43% of the views on Kirk’s article came from outside the US.
Coming in the #2 spot is “Deaths in 2025,” an article that has never been lower than third on our annual list of most-read articles. This annual article is updated by English Wikipedia’s volunteer editors when they find published obituaries that come out after the deaths of notable individuals. 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 in 2025 was Pope Francis. The first Latin American to become pope, Francis served for 12 years before passing away in April. The Catholic Church selected his successor, Pope Leo XIV, a few weeks later. As people rushed online to learn about Leo, traffic to all Wikimedia projects peaked at around 800,000 hits per second—more than 6x over normal traffic levels, and a new all-time record for us. Plenty of people came to learn more about Francis’ life too; his English Wikipedia article was the 11th most-read of the year.
US President Donald Trump entered the office for the second time on January 20, 2025. He is appearing on English Wikipedia’s annual most-read articles list for the eighth time. Since 2015, the English Wikipedia article about Trump has not appeared in that list only in 2022 and 2023.
“The 20 most-read articles on Wikipedia in 2025 show just how much people rely on it to understand the events that shape our lives. Built by a global community of volunteers, each article is a reminder that facts, context, and careful sourcing by humans matter deeply to everyone seeking a trusted place for knowledge,” said Anusha Alikhan, Wikimedia Foundation Chief Communications Officer.
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 do not have a number for repeat visitors to the “Deaths in 2025” page, our assumption is that a good portion of these views are regular and returning readers that come to read those updates. In addition, Wikipedia’s volunteers split the article into smaller month-by-month lists to keep its overall length at a reasonable size. As of publishing time, the page covers December 2025—but if you’re reading it in January 2026, the page will be redirected to Wikipedia’s “Lists of deaths by year.”
- #3: Ed Gein
- #8: Sinners (2025 film)
- #10: Superman (2025 film)
- #12: Severance (TV series)
- #14: Thunderbolts*
- #15: Weapons (2025 film)
- #17: Adolescence (TV series)
- #20: The Fantastic Four: First Steps
For about a decade, we have published a list of the most-read English Wikipedia articles. In almost all of those years, the film and television you consumed, binged, and enjoyed have held prominent positions. 2025 is no different. Part of the reason is the second screen effect, meaning as you watch the latest movie or TV show, you open Wikipedia to learn more about the production, actors, or more; others read Wikipedia’s plot summaries to get all the spoilers.
This year, eight articles highlight this pop culture phenomenon:
- Ed Gein, the US serial killer, appears as a result of Netflix’s latest season of Monster. Only about half of the views to Gein’s article came from inside the US, demonstrating the show’s global reach despite being focused on US crimes. The subjects of Monster‘s previous seasons (Jeffrey Dahmer and Lyle/Erik Menendez) were also highly popular on the English Wikipedia in 2024 and 2022, respectively.
- Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Zach Cregger’s Weapons were two of the most successful films this year at the US box office. Their powerful stories, visuals, and (in Sinners‘ case) music led to them being the first-ever horror entries in all our years of doing these lists.
- The first season of Severance, a US Apple TV show, came out three years ago to rave reviews, but its cultural impact was nothing like this year’s second season. That change can be illustrated through the lens of the English Wikipedia: our page view data shows that it only received about five million hits in 2022, but nearly tripled that in 2025.
- Adolescence, a British Netflix show, has garnered wide attention not just for its acting and storyline, but for its episodes that were shot as one continuous take with no hidden cuts. Pageviews to this article peaked ten days after the show’s release, perhaps as more people discovered it.
- The final three articles are the superhero mainstays from DC and Marvel, including the latest Superman and Fantastic Four reboot, and Marvel’s attempt to craft a “new Avengers” through Thunderbolts*.
One article that just missed this list was KPop Demon Hunters, the animated musical that has taken the world by storm since its release last June. According to Netflix, the film is their “most watched original animated film of all time.”
- #1: Charlie Kirk
- #4: Donald Trump
- #6: Elon Musk
- #7: Zohran Mamdani
- #16: JD Vance
Politics was another major subtheme in the English Wikipedia’s most-read articles of 2025. Five of the top twenty articles fall into this category. In addition to Charlie Kirk and US President Donald Trump, discussed above, two other articles are related to people who hold or have held prominent roles in the US administration: Vice President JD Vance and former senior advisor Elon Musk.
- #9: Ozzy Osbourne
- #18: MrBeast
- #19: Cristiano Ronaldo
Three articles on the list came from pop culture that was unrelated to the entertainment of film and television: Ozzy Osbourne, MrBeast, and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Ozzy Osbourne, the rock singer/reality show star that was also known as the “Prince of Darkness,” passed away in July.
MrBeast, the internet personality with the most-popular YouTube channel on the planet, entered the list for the first time this year. Although millions of people have watched his YouTube videos for years, views to his Wikipedia biography spiked in January after he expressed an interest in buying TikTok.
Without the Olympics, the sporting side of pop culture was far less prominent on this list as opposed to last year. Only the soccer icon Cristiano Ronaldo appeared.
The top 20
For a more in-depth look across a planet’s worth of Wikipedia activity over 2025, please see our dedicated webpage.
- Charlie Kirk, 44,907,789 pageviews
- Deaths in 2025, 42,508,846
- Ed Gein, 31,232,285
- Donald Trump, 25,127,616
- Pope Leo XIV, 22,052,502
- Elon Musk, 20,179,628
- Zohran Mamdani, 20,118,615
- Sinners (2025 film), 18,230,654
- Ozzy Osbourne, 17,787,997
- Superman (2025 film), 17,007,716
- Pope Francis, 15,281,541
- Severance (TV series), 13,892,847
- United States, 13,040,217
- Thunderbolts*, 12,864,839
- Weapons (2025 film), 11,753,018
- JD Vance, 11,617,451
- Adolescence (TV series), 11,571,799
- MrBeast, 11,475,681
- Cristiano Ronaldo, 10,827,510
- The Fantastic Four: First Steps, 10,768,070
Twenty-five years ago, Wikipedia was just a dream. Today, it is the backbone of knowledge on the internet.
The free online encyclopedia’s 25th birthday is coming on 15 January. It will be a time to celebrate the accomplishments of the nearly 250,000 volunteers who help maintain the site every day by keeping its content neutral, its facts cited to reliable sources, and more. Their work represents humanity at its best—the humans of today, organizing themselves to benefit the humans of tomorrow.
Learn more about Wikipedia’s importance in the video below, and keep an eye on this page for a few special announcements next month.
Written by Ed Erhart, Communications Specialist at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Appendix
- 1 While Wikipedia’s strict privacy policy means that we do not have a number for repeat visitors to the “Deaths in 2025” page, our assumption is that a good portion of these views are regular and returning readers that come to read those updates. In addition, Wikipedia’s volunteers split the article into smaller month-by-month lists to keep its overall length at a reasonable size. As of publishing time, the page covers December 2025—but if you’re reading it in January 2026, the page will be redirected to Wikipedia’s “Lists of deaths by year.”
- This list was originally published using English Wikipedia data pulled by the Wikimedia Foundation covering 1 January to 10 November 2025. Please see our Year in Review page for more data—and you can bookmark this blog to see the full year of data, including shifted and new articles, when we update it in January 2026.
- Data notes:
- 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; 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, and browsers like Google Chrome. We suspect that a significant number of the pageviews without referrers are mistakes that occur when viewers are trying to access those.
- We are proud to have published lists of most-read English Wikipedia articles since 2015. You can read that archived content for 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015.
