ODI World Cup, Indian Premier League (IPL) among top 5 most read articles on English Wikipedia in 2023
Cricket managed to make it onto the Wikimedia foundation’s year-end most viewed articles list for the first time.
New Delhi: India’s love and curiosity for cricket is immense and was once again on display when the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia, published their annual list of the most read English-language Wikipedia articles in 2023. ODI World Cup 2023 (3rd position) and Indian Premier League of IPL (4th position) were among the top 5 most viewed articles this year.
IPL is the largest franchise cricket competition in the world and Cricket World Cup 2023 was hosted entirely by India for the first time. Seven articles related to India have been included in the top 25 and this is also the first time that a cricket-based article has made it to the year-end list.
From ChatGPT and Cricket to Barbie and Bollywood, the articles tell the story of how society as a whole seeks knowledge about the ever-changing world.
Cricket is one of the most popular sports in the world, but so far not a single cricket article has made the Foundation’s year-end lists. In 2023, cricket made up a whopping 16 percent of the top 25 articles on English Wikipedia.
The top five articles of the year
1: ChatGPT – 49,490,406 page views
2: Deaths in 2023 – 42,666,860
3: Cricket World Cup 2023 – 38,171,653
4: Indian Premier League – 32,012,810
5: Oppenheimer (movie) – 28,348,248
The articles for the ‘2023 Cricket World Cup’ (number three), organized this year in India, and ‘Indian Premier League’ (number four) have made it into the list of the five most viewed articles. The top five Wikipedia articles, along with the articles ‘Cricket World Cup’ and ‘2023 Indian Premier League’, were collectively viewed more than 116.8 million times.
Interestingly, this year’s ‘2023 Cricket World Cup’ page received 304 percent more interest than the previous edition, ‘2019 Cricket World Cup’, with over 1.25 million views on the day of the tournament final. India’s Virat Kohli was named ‘Player of the Tournament’ at the 2023 World Cup, and he received more page views on English Wikipedia this year (over 10 million) than all the page views for the 2019 Cricket World Cup (just under 9.5 million) .
While cricket and related items feature prominently on the list, Bollywood isn’t far behind, with two of this year’s biggest blockbuster films making their way into the top 25.