Wikipedia's most-read articles are a glimpse into its future
Indian-related sports and movies dominate Wikipedia's most-read list, Jimmy Wales vs. crypto, and kimchi is spicing up the platform.
🔔 Wiki Briefing
The meaning of Wikipedia's most-read articles
Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation released its annual list of the English-language Wikipedia's top 25 most-read articles of 2023. Several of the big winners this year will come as no surprise to anyone who was following the news this year: ChatGPT was #1 with a bullet, Oppenheimer (the film) and Oppenheimer (the man) both landed in the top 10, with Barbie and Taylor Swift not far behind. Famous footballers Ronaldo and Messi both made the list for the third year running.
But some results are more intriguing: six of the top 10 articles were about Indian-related sports and movies. The four sports-related articles all involved cricket, including the Cricket World Cup, which was held in a series of cities around the country. The two others were Bollywood films Jawan and Pathaan, both action thrillers. These results are less surprising if one considers that English is the business language of India, Indians there contribute overwhelmingly more to the English Wikipedia than any other. What's more, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, India is now third-ranked behind the U.S. and UK in total editorship, a huge jump in recent years.
Another leap India took in 2023 was ahead of China for the world's most populous country. As India grows and its information economy develops, it's entirely possible that Wikipedia will matter as much or more to the Indian business community as it does in the West. Perhaps it's no coincidence this year saw India's biggest paid editing scandal, involving one of its richest men. Safe to bet it won't be the last.
📰 In the News
Jimmy Wales is not, er, hodling back
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales might need a new hobby, besides mixing it up on X, formerly Twitter. In recent months he has tangled with Elon Musk more than once, and now he's trading barbs with crypto bros. On December 10, he posted: "I forgot my bank password and lost my entire net worth. No, actually, that didn't happen, because banks work and bitcoin doesn't." The combination of Wales' internet celebrity and intentional provocation drew the ire of X's robust crypto community, with whom Wales gladly continued the argument for a few days. Read more at Cointelegraph.
Photo of Jimmy Wales by Zachary McCune / Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Kimchi spicing up Wikipedia
A recent study in the Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture, titled "Evaluation of Accuracy and Adequacy of Kimchi Information in Major Foreign Online Encyclopedias", surveyed Wikipedia, Britannica, China's Baidu Baike, and Citizendium. Based on a machine translation, Wikipedia "provides the most information about kimchi", however some information does "not correspond to the facts" and much information "needs to be supplemented".
🧩 Wikipedia Facts
One more thing about Wikipedia's top-ranked pages: the actual most-visited page on Wikipedia is its main page, and the second-most viewed page is its search results page. You can understand why they are excluded. Since Wikipedia first started collecting records, the main page has been visited more than 47 billion times, more than all other pages put together.
💡 Tips & Tricks
If you are looking at an article's "View history" page, by default it will show you the last 50 edits. At the top and bottom of the list are buttons that will let you change the view to 20, 100, 250 or even 500 edits. But here's something else you can do: look at the URL for the page, and notice the number at the end of the sequence. You can change this to any number between 1 and 5000 and see that many edits. Be forewarned: generating a list of the last 5,000 edits will probably take a few minutes to load!
