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Including two popes, the Prince of Darkness, and MrBeast.

Wikipedia will mark its 25th anniversary on January 15, 2026. No one could have predicted 25 years ago that Wikipedia would grow into the backbone of knowledge on the internet it is today—powering search engines, voice assistants, and generative AI tools.

Today, nearly 250,000 volunteers generously give their time and energy to update Wikipedia, add citations, build consensus, and more. They keep knowledge human. In 2025, people spent an estimated 2.8 billion hours reading English Wikipedia articles, according to data from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. The top 25 most-read English Wikipedia articles of 2025 outlined below focus on politics, popular culture, and loss.

You can also check outour dedicated Year in Review webpage to dig deeper into data about Wikipedia.

#1:Deaths in 2025, 49,617,383
#2:Charlie Kirk, 46,493,112
#3:Ed Gein, 33,000,749
#4:Donald Trump, 27,489,965
#5:Pope Leo XIV, 22,884,665

The most-read article on English Wikipedia this year is “Deaths in 2025,” an article that has never been lower than third on our annual list of most-read articles. This annual article is updated by English Wikipedia’s volunteer editors when they find published obituaries that come out after the deaths ofnotable individuals. With eight billion people in the world, there are a large number of notable deaths to update the page with each day.¹

Coming in just behind is Charlie Kirk, a US political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality who was assassinated in September at a university campus debate he organized. In the day afterwards, people viewed the article about Kirk nearly 15 million times, or an average of over 170 times per second. Across the first eleven months of the year, about 43% of the views on Kirk’s article came from outside the US.

One of those deaths in 2025 was Pope Francis. The first Latin American to become pope, Francis served for 12 years before passing away in April. The Catholic Church selected his successor, Pope Leo XIV, a few weeks later. As people rushed online to learn about Leo, traffic to all Wikimedia projects peaked at around 800,000 hits per second—more than 6x over normal traffic levels, and a new all-time record for us. Plenty of people came to learn more about Francis’ life too; his English Wikipedia article was the 11th most-read of the year.

US President Donald Trump entered the office for the second time on January 20, 2025. He is appearing on English Wikipedia’s annual most-read articles list for the eighth time. Since 2015, the English Wikipedia article about Trump hasnot appeared in that list only in 2022 and 2023.

“The most-read articles on Wikipedia in 2025 show just how much people rely on it to understand the events that shape our lives. Built by a global community of volunteers, each article is a reminder that facts, context, and careful sourcing by humans matter deeply to everyone seeking a trusted place for knowledge,” saidAnusha Alikhan, Wikimedia Foundation Chief Communications Officer.

Scroll down to learn more about the other top articles, and you can find the full list featured at the bottom.

¹While Wikipedia’sstrict privacy policy means that we do not have a number for repeat visitors to the “Deaths in 2025” page, our assumption is that a good portion of these views are regular and returning readers that come to read those updates. In addition, Wikipedia’s volunteers split the article into smaller month-by-month lists to keep its overall length at a reasonable size. As of publishing time, the page covers December 2025—but if you’re reading it in January 2026, the page will be redirected to Wikipedia’s “Lists of deaths by year.”

For about a decade, we have published a list of the most-read English Wikipedia articles. In almost all of those years, the film and television you consumed, binged, and enjoyed have held prominent positions. 2025 is no different. Part of the reason is thesecond screen effect, meaning as you watch the latest movie or TV show, you open Wikipedia to learn more about the production, actors, or more; othersread Wikipedia’s plot summaries to get all the spoilers.

This year, ten articles highlighted this pop culture phenomenon:

Ed Gein, the US serial killer, appears as a result of Netflix’slatest season ofMonster.Only about half of the views to Gein’s article came from inside the US, demonstrating the show’s global reach despite being focused on US crimes. The subjects ofMonster‘s previous seasons (Jeffrey Dahmer andLyle/Erik Menendez) were also highly popular on the English Wikipedia in2024 and2022, respectively.
Ryan Coogler’sSinners and Zach Cregger’sWeaponswere two of the most successful films this year at the US box office. Their powerful stories, visuals, and (inSinners‘case) music led to them being the first-ever horror entries in all our years of doing these lists.
The first season ofSeverance, a US Apple TV show, came out three years ago to rave reviews, but its cultural impact was nothing like this year’s second season. That change can be illustrated through the lens of the English Wikipedia: our page view data shows that it only received about five million hits in 2022, but nearly tripled that in 2025.
Adolescence, a British Netflix show, has garnered wide attention not just for its acting and storyline, but for its episodes that were shot as one continuous take with no hidden cuts. Pageviews to this article peaked ten days after the show’s release, perhaps as more people discovered it.
KPop Demon Hunters, the animated musical, has taken the world by storm since its release last June. According to Netflix, the film is their “most watched original animated film of all time.”
Superhero mainstays from DC and Marvel include the latestSuperman reboot and Marvel’s attempt to craft a “new Avengers” throughThunderbolts*.

These articles are joined by the filmmakerRob Reiner, whose murder in December led people to read about his life and work on English Wikipedia over 12.6 million times.

Politics was another major subtheme in the English Wikipedia’s most-read articles of 2025. Seven of the top twenty-five articles fall into this category. In addition to Charlie Kirk and US President Donald Trump, discussed above, three other articles are related to people who hold or have held prominent roles in the US administration: Vice President JD Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and former senior advisor Elon Musk.

Four articles on the list came from popular culture outside the bounds of film: Ozzy Osbourne, Cristiano Ronaldo, the upcoming 2026 World Cup, and MrBeast.

Ozzy Osbourne, the rock singer/reality show star that was also known as the “Prince of Darkness,” passed away in July. Football/soccer icon Ronaldo appeared on this annual list for the sixth time, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup joined him aftera December 5 ceremony where the tournament’s seeding was announced.

Finally, MrBeast—the internet personality with the most-popular YouTube channel on the planet—entered this annual list for the first time. Although millions of people have watched his YouTube videos for years, views to his Wikipedia biography spiked in January afterhe expressed an interest in buying TikTok.

The top 25

For a more in-depth look across a planet’s worth of Wikipedia activity over 2025, please seeour dedicated webpage.

Deaths in 2025, 49,617,383
Charlie Kirk, 46,493,112
Ed Gein, 33,000,749
Donald Trump, 27,489,965
Pope Leo XIV, 22,884,665
Zohran Mamdani, 21,805,460
Elon Musk, 21,462,884
Sinners(2025 film), 19,072,450
Ozzy Osbourne, 18,490,296
Superman(2025 film), 17,703,390
Pope Francis, 15,610,627
Jeffrey Epstein, 15,214,143
United States, 14,851,017
Severance(TV series), 14,457,583
2026 FIFA World Cup, 14,037,618
Rob Reiner, 13,955,892
Dhurandhar, 13,525,394
Thunderbolts*, 13,203,209
Weapons(2025 film), 12,684,066
JD Vance, 12,339,381
Cristiano Ronaldo, 12,290,689
MrBeast, 12,012,142
Adolescence(TV series), 11,884,240
KPop Demon Hunters, 11,856,384
Karoline Leavitt, 11,813,280

Twenty-five years ago, Wikipedia was just a dream. Today, it is the backbone of knowledge on the internet.

The free online encyclopedia’s 25th birthday is coming on 15 January. It will be a time to celebrate the accomplishments of the nearly 250,000 volunteers who help maintain the site every day by keeping its content neutral, its facts cited to reliable sources, and more. Their work represents humanity at its best—the humans of today, organizing themselves to benefit the humans of tomorrow.

You can learn more about Wikipedia’s importance in the video below and witness our coverage of Wikipedia 25on our website.

Written by Ed Erhart, Communications Specialist at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Appendix

¹While Wikipedia’sstrict privacy policy means that we do not have a number for repeat visitors to the “Deaths in 2025” page, our assumption is that a good portion of these views are regular and returning readers that come to read those updates. In addition, Wikipedia’s volunteers split the article into smaller month-by-month lists to keep its overall length at a reasonable size. As of publishing time, the page covered December 2025—but in 2026, the page was redirected to Wikipedia’s “Lists of deaths by year.”
This list was originally published using English Wikipedia data pulled by the Wikimedia Foundation covering 1 January to 10 November 2025. In January 2026, the list was updated to encompass the entire previous year and expanded to 25 entries. Several articles entered the list at that time: Jeffrey Epstein, 2026 FIFA World Cup, Rob Reiner,Dhurandhar,KPop Demon Hunters, and Karoline Leavitt. One fell off it:The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Please seeour 2025 Year in Review page for other kinds of yearly data.
Data notes:
- All of the pageviews include direct andindirect navigations to the pages in question.
- This list has been screened for false positives with methods including:
  - Cross-referencing the pageviews against the percentage of views they received from desktop devices, as extreme values of less than 2% or more than 80% correlates strongly with spam, botnets, or other concerns. This affected articles like Cleopatra, a long-time false positive; XXXTentacion; and .xxx.
  - Looking at the number of pageviews that did not have a referrer and removing articles with extremely high values. This impacted a number of articles about large websites, such as Facebook, and browsers like Google Chrome. We suspect that a significant number of the pageviews without referrers are mistakes that occur when viewers are trying to access those.
We are proud to have published lists of most-read English Wikipedia articles since 2015. You can read that archived content for2024,2023,2022,2021,2020,2019,2018,2017,2016, and2015.

Image credits

Header image: Candle by Rolf Schweizer Fotografie, CC BY 2.0; Ronaldo by Ludovic Péron, CC BY-SA 3.0; KPop Demon Hunters poster by Netflix/Sony Pictures Animation, fair use; Ozzy Osbourne by John Mathew Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0; Pope Leo by Edgar Beltrán, CC BY-SA 4.0; Charlie Kirk by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0; Superman poster from Warner Bros., fair use; MrBeast by Steven Khan, CC BY 4.0; Ed Gein, public domain; Pope Francis by Quirinale.it; Zohran Mamdani by Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0; Thunderbolts* poster from Marvel Studios/Walt Disney, fair use; Weapons poster from Warner Bros., fair use; Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore, CC BY 2.5; Sinners poster from Warner Bros./Proximity Media, fair use; flag by Noah Wulf, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Top five: Candle by Rolf Schweizer Fotografie, CC BY 2.0; Charlie Kirk by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0; Ed Gein, public domain; Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore, CC BY 2.5; Pope Leo by Edgar Beltrán, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Politics: Charlie Kirk by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0; Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore, CC BY 2.5; Zohran Mamdani by Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0; Elon Musk by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0; Jeffrey Epstein, public domain.
Pop culture: Ozzy Osbourne by John Mathew Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0; 2018 World Cup qualification – Wales by Steindy, CC BY-SA 3.0; Ronaldo by Ludovic Péron, CC BY-SA 3.0; MrBeast by Steven Khan, CC BY 4.0.
Entertainment: Ed Gein, public domain; Sinners poster from Warner Bros./Proximity Media, fair use; Superman on a bus stop by Newell Reinvention, CC BY-SA 2.0; Adam Scott by Kevin Paul, CC BY 4.0; Rob Reiner 1971 by unknown author, public domain.