Most viewed and edited Wikipedia articles by year, 2001 – 2020
What happens in the world happens on Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the first places people go to learn more about things happening in the world around them. Thankfully, a global community of volunteers work diligently to edit articles so they include the most current and reliable information possible.
In many cases, the top viewed and edited Wikipedia articles reflect major events that occurred in a given year. Explore data sets from the past two decades below.*
Photo credits
*Please see the following notes regarding the data included in this interactive:
Only content pages are included in the data set. The main (i.e. home) pages of Wikimedia projects were excluded.
A page view is defined as a request for the content of a web page.
Due to data constraints, the most viewed articles are available only between years 2016 to 2020.
For pageviews before April 2020, the data include user pageviews and some unflagged automated pageviews. Bot traffic is excluded. Spurious IE views from some countries are also excluded – these are anomalous patterns of “non-human” pageviews from IE7 from three countries. Although these pageviews are not labeled as bots, they are either bots or automated traffic.
For pageviews from April 2020, the data include only user pageviews, automated pageviews are excluded with new automated-traffic detection.
Edits that have been reverted or deleted are included among total edits.
Edits for redirects are not included and edits to target pages are included. Pageviews to all redirects and target pages are included.
Data for 2020 was updated to reflect the full year.
After this data was published, we changed the English Wikipedia’s most-viewed article of 2017 from Darth Vader to Donald Trump after the former was identified as a false positive.