The most popular articles within the English edition of Wikipedia during 2012 have been listed by Swedish software engineer Johan Gunnarsson. Actually at that given link you will find not just the English language top 10 and top 100 but top 100s for lots and lots of other countries and languages including French, Persian and Japanese.
Let’s have a look at the English Wikipedia top 10 list:
|
Page name |
View count |
|
1. Facebook |
32 647 942 |
|
2. Wiki |
29 613 759 |
|
25 418 587 |
|
|
22 351 637 |
|
|
22 268 644 |
|
|
21 779 423 |
|
|
20 619 920 |
|
|
18 882 885 |
|
|
9. Google |
18 508 719 |
|
10. The Hunger Games |
18 431 626 |
Yes, it’s another result to show how important Facebook is to so many people in the (English speaking) world. The Facebook article is the number one item looked at within Wikipedia’s huge pool of knowledge. Shortly behind the Facebook researchers we have a large herd of people who’d like to know what the “Wiki” prefix of Wikipedia means. (The full term Wikipedia is the 27th most popular Wikipedia article.) The third most popular English Wikipedia article is “Deaths in 2012”, which is a very long list which also includes “deaths of notable animals and other biological life forms”. I quickly scanned though the list but couldn’t find any dead animals or plants.
We English speakers are not alone in our dim and base queries of the Wikipedia resource. The top Wikipedia page in Japan was some sort of catalogue of adult video actresses. The top Spanish language Wikipedia page was also about Facebook, in second position an article about the @ sign was only slightly more popular than One Direction (a boy band). The Chinese mostly looked up Chinese search giant Baidu. Also they were very interested in Japanese adult video actresses. It is suggested that looking up Google (or Baidu) may be a computing accident – a user Google’s Google and then clicks upon the Wikipedia Google entry...
Our neighbours in France were most interested in Japanese Holly this year (not a Japanese adult video actress, it’s a plant), second place was “France”, and then good old Facebook. An overall trend was that speakers of a particular language would read up about their home countries upon Wikipedia.
Interestingly none of this year’s top 10 Wikipedia articles feature in the top 10 Google searches of 2012, although there is some overlap of Google’s third most popular search of “Whitney Houston” with Wikipedia’s third placed article “Deaths in 2012”.
