With Wikipedia securing its funding for the next year in just nine days, you can rest assured that it will continue to help the people of the world find out all there is to know about Facebook, One Direction or Fifty Shades of Grey. While Wikipedia may aim to be the sum of all human knowledge, most humans are interested in decidedly less than "all" the knowledge.
The
most visited Wikipedia page in 2012 was actually Facebook's entry. You'd think this has to do with the site's popularity and it does, but not in the way you think.
Most likely, 32 million people didn't just suddenly feel the need to be informed about the ubiquitous site, rather they ended up on the Wikipedia page when they just wanted to find Facebook.
This is why Facebook is the top searched term on any search engine. That's exactly why "Wiki" is the second most visited page on Wikipedia.
It's not that 29 million people really need to know what wiki stands for, it's that they were trying to get to wikipedia, typed "wiki" into the search box and clicked on the first result.
The most visited Wikipedia page that people actually meant to visit is "Deaths in 2012" which, while a little morbid, makes sense.
The fourth most visited page was the entry for the boyband One Direction, presumably visited by anyone over 18 trying to figure out what all the fuss was about and what happened to Justin Bieber.
Some of the most popular movies of the year are also in the top 10, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and The Hunger Games.
Finally, the ultra-popular Fifty Shades of Grey also made the list, at number six. Speaking of phenomena, the "2012 phenomenon" is at number seven.
The top 10 is derived from official data, but it is not published or endorsed by Wikipedia. Swedish developer Johan Gunnarsson looked at raw log data to come up with the list. He also compiled the top 100 most popular articles for the most popular localized Wikipedias.
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