The Wikimedia Foundation has revealed the 25 most-read articles on English Wikipedia this year with ChatGPT comfortably in the number one spot.

Just over one year since its launch, ChatGPT  – and artificial intelligence (AI) in general – continues to be a hot topic, in public discourse. Often as a source of concern. This week a study found 36% of the world’s IT workers are fearful AI will take their jobs over the next five years.

The Wikimedia report detailed the large language model (LLM) chatbot’s article had “pageviews between 100,000 and 400,000 nearly every day.”

“In fact, across all of the languages Wikipedia supports, we registered over 78 million pageviews to ChatGPT articles.”

The list of the most-viewed Wikipedia articles of 2023 includes the figures up to Nov. 28, but a full, definitive list up to the end of the year will be compiled and released in January.

Other topics in the top 10 included Deaths in 2023, Cricket World Cup (plus two other cricket entries) and two different listings relating to the Oppenheimer film.

Impact of ChatGPT

Sports, film and celebrities are popular evergreen pop-culture topics people want to read about. Those areas always dominate the Wikipedia list but it is a sign of the times and the vast interest in OpenAI’s flagship product it commands the top spot.

The ChatGPT entry on Wikipedia begins with a concise explanation of what it is:

“ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022. Based on a large language model, it enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.”

As is customary with all content listed on the online encyclopedia, the article gives a detailed explanation and breakdown of ChatGPT and is available in 98 languages.

The 25 most-read articles on English Wikipedia in 2023

ChatGPT: 49,490,406
Deaths in 2023: 42,666,860
2023 Cricket World Cup: 38,171,653
Indian Premier League: 32,012,810
 Oppenheimer (film): 28,348,248
Cricket World Cup: 25,961,417
J. Robert Oppenheimer: 25,672,469
 Jawan (film): 21,791,126
2023 Indian Premier League: 20,694,974
 Pathaan (film): 19,932,509
The Last of Us (TV series): 19,791,789
Taylor Swift: 19,418,385
 Barbie (film): 18,051,077
Cristiano Ronaldo: 17,492,537
Lionel Messi: 16,623,630
Premier League: 16,604,669
Matthew Perry: 16,454,666
United States: 16,240,461
Elon Musk: 14,370,395
 Avatar: The Way of Water: 14,303,116
India: 13,850,178
Lisa Marie Presley: 13,764,007
 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: 13,392,917
Russian invasion of Ukraine: 12,798,866
Andrew Tate: 12,728,616

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