In a nutshell: Wikipedia has released its 11th annual list of the most-read articles throughout the year. In 2025, people spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours reading English Wikipedia articles. The most popular entry? Charlie Kirk's page.
In the day after his assassination at a university campus in December, Kirk's Wikipedia page was viewed 15 million times, or an average of over 170 times per second.
Across the whole of 2025, Kirk's page was visited almost 45 million times – 43% of these came from outside the US. While he was a well-known figure in his homeland, many outside of the country were unfamiliar with his name before the shooting, which made headlines around the world.
Wikipedia's second most-read article (42.5 million views) was Deaths in 2025. It's no surprise to see this entry as it's never been lower than third on the organization's annual list of most-read articles; the page was Wikipedia's most-read article last year.
Next was Ed Gein's page, which had 31.2 million views. Interest in the US serial killer surged following the release of Netflix's third season of Monster, in which Charlie Hunnam played the Butcher of Plainfield himself.
Other notable entries include Donald Trump in fourth (25.1 million) and Elon Musk in sixth (20.1 million). Since 2015, the only times the English Wikipedia article about Trump has not appeared in the list was in 2022 and 2023.
Making up the rest of the top ten are Pope Leo XIV in fifth (22 million) – the first Pope to have been born in the US. After the Catholic Church selected the successor to Pope Francis, traffic to all Wikimedia projects peaked at around 800,000 hits per second – more than 6x normal traffic levels and a new all-time record – as people searched for information about the new Pope online.
Elsewhere, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is seventh (20.1 million), and legendary heavy metal icon Ozzy Osbourne, who passed away in July, is ninth (17.7 million).
The remaining two spots in the top ten are taken by movies. Ryan Coogler's 1930s-set vampire horror Sinners is eighth (18.2 million), while James Gunn's 2025 Superman is tenth (17 million).
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, writes that 250,000 volunteers keep the site updated. On January 15, the internet's knowledge repository will celebrate its 25th birthday.