The most popular topic on Wikipedia in 2023 could also be the fall of the site: ChatGPT. The English Wikipedia’s ChatGPT page has attracted nearly 50 million total visitors this year as of November 28, making it more popular even than Taylor Swift and barbieaccording to a report from Wikipedia’s nonprofit host, the Wikimedia Foundation.
The AI chatbot launched by a San Francisco-based company OpenAI in November 2022 has propelled generative AI into the mainstream. ChatGPT itself achieved 100 million weekly active users this fall, and almost every Fortune 500 company is using the platform, according to OpenAI.
But Wikipedia editors also worried that AI-generated content by chatbots such as ChatGPT could erode the trust of its readers by creating biased or incorrect content. A prolific Wikipedia writer, Barkeep49, known for his article “Death of Wikipedia” on the dangers of AI for the site – told the New York Times this summer that ChatGPT could force Wikipedia to “fall off a cliff» in the next four or five years.
But for now, people still visit Wikipedia. The English version of the site has been viewed 84 billion times this year, according to Wikimedia spokesperson Anusha Alikhan. Here is some other hot topics on the site in 2023:
Dead, cricket
Death is popular on Wikipedia. Many of the site’s more than 265,000 volunteer contributors compile a frequently updated list of “notable” deaths of journalists, politicians, entertainers, business executives and athletes around the world .
Wikipedia’s annual death lists have been among the site’s top five most popular articles since at least 2015. List of deaths 2023 was the most visited page on the site this year after OpenAI, according to Wikimedia. It received around 130,000 views on average each day, and almost 43 million visits in total.
“People visit Wikipedia to learn more about the world around them, and while death is a difficult and complex topic, it is still a popular topic on Wikipedia,” Alikhan told Quartz via email.
Meanwhile, the Cricket World Cup 2023 was the third most popular article this year on Wikipedia, with 38 million hits, putting the topic of cricket on the annual list for the very first time. The Wiki page for the Indian Premier League, the Indian cricket league, follows closely, attracting 32 million views.
Barbenheimer and more
THE “Barbenheimer« phenomenon: the simultaneous premieres of films barbie And Oppenheimer in July, it led millions of people to go to the cinema – caused a sensation on Wikipedia, just as it did at the box office. The Wiki page barbie (movie) attracted 18 million visits, making it #13 among the site’s most popular articles in 2023.
While barbie exceeds Oppenheimer in income, Wikimedia note, Wikipedia Oppenheimer (movie) The page saw about 57% more page views as people sought to learn more about the story behind the film, which depicts the life of the man who created the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The movie page has amassed over 28.3 million pages, ranking in the top five.
Among the most popular Wikipedia articles of 2023 were also pages on Taylor Swift (n°12), Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (No. 14), and Elon Musk (No. 19).
