ChatGPT beats Barbie and Oppenheimer to top Wikipedia searches
Faced with the threat of an AI chatbot hijacking the written word this year, tens of millions of people sought solace in Wikipedia.
The publicly edited online encyclopaedia had 84 billion views in 2023 and the most popular article was on OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
More than 49 million readers accessed the ChatGPT Wikipedia page which details the stratospheric growth — from its launch just over a year ago, to the technology now being used across society, from schools to healthcare.
According to numbers released by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation this week, the second most accessed page was on deaths in 2023, which had 42.6 million views. Notable death pages often top Wikipedia’s yearly views and this year’s page included Matthew Perry, the Friends actor, and Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley.
The 2023 Cricket World Cup took third place on the list, alongside three other cricket-related entries in Wikipedia’s top 25 articles this year, including the Indian Premier League at No 4. This is the first time cricket content has made the list since Wikimedia Foundation started tracking in 2015.
Oppenheimer the film, and its real-life subject J Robert Oppenheimer, also attracted attention with 28.3 million and 25.7 million page views respectively.
Other movies to make the list were Greta Gerwig’s Barbie at number 13 with 18 million page views and the highly anticipated second instalment in the Avatar series, The Way of Water, which secured 14.3 million views at No 20.
Pages on famous people with the most views included Taylor Swift (19.4 million), Cristiano Ronaldo (17.5 million) and Elon Musk (14.4 million).
The page on the Russian invasion of Ukraine received 12.8 million views and was just one position higher on the list than Andrew Tate, the influencer charged with rape and human trafficking, whose page had 12.7 million views.
According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the top 25 list was created using English Wikipedia data as of November 28 and numbers for the full year are set to be updated in January.
The top countries that accessed English Wikipedia overall to date in 2023 are the United States (33.2 billion) and the United Kingdom (9 billion) — followed by India (8.48 billion), Canada (3.95 billion) and Australia (2.56 billion), according to data shared with the Associated Press.
