AUSTIN (KXAN) — We collectively spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours reading English-language articles on Wikipedia in 2024, and we now know which were the most popular.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, has released its annual list of most popular articles on the site.
Wikipedia's list of deaths in 2024 claimed the top spot, with more than 44.4 million page views. The site's annual list of notable deaths often features as one of the most-read articles each year.
Interest in the U.S. presidential election spurred a lot of traffic on the site. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris' page was the second-most read with almost 29 million page views, while Republican nominee Donald Trump took the number five spot with about 25.3 million page views. His running mate, JD Vance, came in seventh with about 23.3 million page views.
Wikipedia's main article on the election was the third-most viewed of the year, with more than 27.9 million page views.
Here’s a look at the full list of 25 most-viewed Wikipedia articles of 2024:
Several sports-related articles appeared in the top 25, including pages on the 2020 Summer Olympics in Paris, the UEFA Euro 2024 soccer tournament and the Indian Premier League.
And here’s a look at the most-viewed articles over the past few years:
According to the Wikimedia Foundation, more than 31 million edits were made to English-language articles this year, adding about 3.5 billion bytes of information to the site.
The page view data is as of Nov. 22, 2024. Final data for the year will be released in early January.