Wikipedia is a kind of internet outlier.
It’s the seventh-most visited website in the world, but it’s written and edited by volunteers, is free of paywalls, and has remained a nonprofit since it launched in 2001.
Some argue it’s one of the most reliable sources of information available online due to its careful sourcing and diligent editors, and its annual list of its most-read articles provides insight into which topics garnered the most interest in a given year.
So, what was hot in 2024?
English-language Wikipedia has received 76B+ views worldwide in 2024. The most-visited pages, as of Nov. 22, were:
- A list of deaths in 2024 (44.4m+ views): This list has ranked third place or higher each year since Wikipedia began releasing viewer data in 2015.
- Kamala Harris (~29m views)
- 2024 US Presidential Election (27.9m views)
- Lyle & Erik Menendez (26.1m): The brothers returned to the headlines decades after being found guilty of the 1989 murder of their parents due to “Monsters,” a controversial yet popular Netflix series, and the news that they’ll be resentenced in 2025.
- Donald Trump (25.3m views)
What else?
Crime, entertainment, and politics.
Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris may have taken the second spot, but politics dominated the list, with elections and political figures accounting for 10 of the top 25 pages.
Entertainment — Taylor Swift, Deadpool & Wolverine, Dune: Part Two, Kalki 2898 AD — and sports, like the 2024 Olympics and the Indian Premier League, also made the top 25.
In addition to the Mendendez brothers, controversial figures rounded out the list:
- Griselda Blanco, a Colombian drug lord who died in 2012, got 13.5m views, also due to the Netflix treatment.
- Rapper Sean Combs (AKA Diddy) got 13.1m+ views. He was arrested and charged with sex trafficking in September.
ChatGPT also scored 16.6m views, down significantly from 2023, when it topped the list with 52.5m+ views.
And yet, all of these big numbers pale in comparison to 2020’s hottest Wikipedia page: you guessed it, “COVID-19 pandemic,” with 83.7m+ views.
Wikipedia, thanks for helping us figure out what the heck everyone is talking about — and for this list of animals with human diplomas.
