Where Data Tells the Story
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Next Thursday (January 15) will mark 25 years since the founding of Wikipedia. In the past two and a half decades, the collaborative content hub has expanded to include over 65 million articles across more than 300 languages, written, edited, and fact checked by nearly 250,000 volunteers. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, alongside other Wiki projects, people spent close to 2.4 billion hours reading English Wikipedia articles last year, with highly read pages including topics from politics to popular culture.
In an annual roundup of the site's most visited pages, the Wikimedia Foundation reveals that the most viewed page was on Charlie Kirk, the far-right political activist from the United States who was assassinated last year during a university rally in Utah. The page was visited nearly 45 million times. As the roundup shows, notable deaths are often a catalyst for people to head online and to do some background reading, with the second most viewed page listed as the general ‘Deaths in 2025’. In third position follows Ed Gein, a famed U.S. murderer. While he died back in 1984, interest in the killer surged following the release of the Netflix series Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
Political events and figures continue to draw interest. U.S. President Donald Trump appeared in fourth position last year, with 25.1 million people turning online to read up on the POTUS. In sixth place comes Elon Musk, famed for X, Tesla and SpaceX, as well as having held the position as the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the latter of which he retired from in May, following a public feud with Trump. Zohran Mamdani, in seventh place, is the newly appointed Mayor of New York.
Another key figure that appears in the top roundup is the new head of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV. The pope received nearly 22.1 million views on his Wikipedia page last year. This places him above the late Pope Francis, who died on April 21, 2025 and had 15.3 million views on his Wikipedia page last year (rank 11).