The place to go to when you want to know about pretty much anything in the world is Wikipedia. The online, crowdsourced encyclopedia serves as both a collective knowledge of our history and a living record of our present.
That’s very much evident in the Wikipedia Top Articles of 2024, a list released by the Wikimedia Foundation that serves as a sort of Spotify Wrapped for the world. Given that we live in interesting times (which Wikipedia tells us is not actually a Chinese curse), death was top of mind this year, with Deaths in 2024 taking the top spot.
Among them was YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who was one of Google’s first employees and rented out her garage to its founders to start their company in. Wojcicki passed away in August and left behind a final blog post that her family and YouTube published after her death. In it, she urged people to focus on the present, writing, “Life is unpredictable for everyone, with many unknowns, but there is a lot of beauty in everyday life.” It’s something to keep in mind as we examine the most popular category in the top articles of the past year: politics.
This was one of the most politically divided years of our times, and as such, many people turned to Wikipedia to learn more about the candidates, the people they surrounded themselves with, and the issues. The Wikimedia Foundation noted that it saw 4.2 million views for the 2024 presidential election article on Election Day and that the 2020 presidential election article more than doubled its views in November. The top topics were:
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Kamala Harris (#2 with 28,960,278 views)
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2024 United States presidential election (#3 with 27,910,346 views)
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Donald Trump (#5 with 25,293,855 views)
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JD Vance (#7 with 23,303,160 views)
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Project 2025 (#9 with 19,741,623 views)
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2020 United States presidential election (#13 with 16,351,730 views)
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Elon Musk (#17 with 15,535,053 views)
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Joe Biden (#19 with 14,536,522 views)
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (#24 with 12,375,410 views)
The last entrant on the list, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was responsible for one of X’s last good days before its post-election loss of users. Kennedy posted a video to X in which he nonchalantly recounts to Roseanne Barr a decade-old story of him placing a dead baby bear in his car, riding around with it for a while, and then eventually dumping it in Central Park. Prior to the posting of this video, the bear’s appearance in Central Park had been an unsolved mystery. Wikipedia editors were quick to add it to Kennedy’s page under the heading Treatment of Dead Animals.
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Pop culture had to do a lot to take any focus away from politics in 2024, but it managed with the topics:
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Lyle and Erik Menendez (#4 with 26,126,811 views)
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Deadpool & Wolverine (#8 with 22,362,102 views)
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Taylor Swift (#11 with 17,089,827 views)
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Kalki 2898 AD (#18 with 14,588,383 views)
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Griselda Blanco (#21 with 13,491,792 views)
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Sean Combs (#22 with 13,112,437 views)
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Dune: Part Two (#23 with 12,788,834 views)
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Liam Payne (#25 with 12,087,141 views)
The Menendez brothers took over headlines for the first time since the early 90s when Ryan Murphy took some major liberties with their tragic story and turned it into a soapy anthology series called Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story for Netflix. While much of the series was fabricated, it made many reconsider the problematic trial of the brothers, who were convicted of killing their parents after enduring years of abuse. Peacock also revisited the story in a docuseries called Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed, and, partly due to the increased visibility it brought to the case, the brothers (who are currently serving life sentences) will be resentenced this coming January.
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While the Wikimedia Foundation based this list on the English language version of Wikipedia, there is one topic that was probably popular worldwide: the Summer Olympics. Sure enough, they made the top articles, with a few other sports-related articles:
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Indian Premier League (#6 with 24,560,689 views)
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2024 Summer Olympics (#14 with 16,061,381 views)
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UEFA Euro 2024 (#15 with 15,680,913 views)
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Cristiano Ronaldo (#20 with 13,698,372 views)
In a world so dominated by technology, it’s surprising that there is only one tech topic on the top 25, but it sums up the most talked-about technology of the year: artificial intelligence. Wikipedia’s ChatGPT article is in the number 12 spot. It’s an interesting twist since ChatGPT is increasingly the place people go to perform the sort of searches they do on Wikipedia, though with drastically different results.
While anyone can edit Wikipedia, anything that is added needs to follow the site’s content policies, which include supplying a reliable, published source for each piece of information. You can also review the complete editing history of every article by clicking its “view history” tab. This is vastly different from ChatGPT and its brethren, which don’t always cite sources and are prone to hallucination. Those who treat ChatGPT as a reputable search engine are subject to misinformation. It can be extremely difficult to convince someone who has obtained “facts” from this highly touted technology of truths, which could potentially make 2025 a more interesting year than this one.
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About Chandra Steele
Senior Features Writer
