2022's Most Viewed Wikipedia Pages In Australia
As we get close to the end of 2022, people are looking back at the music they listened to, books they read, and movies they watched. But what about Wikipedia pages?
Thanks to data made available by the Wikimedia Foundation, we have a list of the most viewed Wikipedia pages in Australia between December 2021-November 2022. More information on the data can be found here, or see the full Top 500 viewed pages in Australia here.
The two most popular pages were the Wikipedia main page and search page. After excluding those we've come up with the following highlights.
Australia's Top 5 Viewed Wikipedia Pages
Australians spent the last year looking at all sorts of topics, and the Top 5 most viewed pages on Wikipedia represent some of the years most popular news stories. Whether it's a new Prime Minister or trending TV series, when something is in the news curious Australians turned to Wikipedia for more information.
- Jeffrey Dahmer (2,209,500 views)
- Deaths in 2022 (1,882,600 views)
- Elizabeth II (1,479,900)
- 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (1,335,700)
- Anthony Albanese (1,148,300)
Cookies en français
For some reason, the sixth most visited Wikipedia page in Australia was Cookie. Not the biscuit, but the things that track your web browsing. Even more odd though, it was the French Wikipedia page "Cookie (informatique)" which was being viewed.
As recently reported by SFGATE, the French language Wikipedia page for Cookie has been one of the most highly viewed pages on Wikipedia since June 2022 and no one is quite sure why. This is mainly because Wikipedia doesn't track users in the same way other websites do, so how people use Wikipedia can be a bit of a mystery.
Australian Politics
It was an election year in Australia, and while current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the 5th most viewed Wikipedia page in Australia, former prime minister Scott Morrison reached 31.
Below are the next five most popular pages around Australia's elections.
- 23. Candidates of the 2022 Australian federal election
- 27. 2022 Australian federal election
- 29. Opinion polling for the 2022 Australian federal election
- 127. 2022 Victorian state election
- 141. 2019 Australian federal election
Sports
If you're from Melbourne you'd think the AFL was Australia's favourite sport. But Aussie rules didn't rank highly on Australia's Wikipedia views, with only the AFL goalkicking records page in the Top 100, and then at number 404 was the 2007 AFL Grand Final.
Sports stars also ranked highly, with Ashleigh Barty at 10 and Shane Warne at 18, making them some of our most viewed people of 2022.
Here's some of the top sports pages Australians viewed:
- 13. 2022 FIFA World Cup
- 88. 2022 ICC Men's T20 World Cup
- 89. VFL/AFL goalkicking records
- 108. FIFA World Cup
- 122. 2022 Commonwealth Games
TV and Movies
Australians love super heroes, sci-fi, and fantasy. At least according to what was viewed on Wikipedia. So many of the top viewed pages were movies and TV shows. Here's the Top 5 of each.
TV shows
- 12. House of the Dragon
- 34. Stranger Things
- 37. Stranger Things (season 4)
- 41. Euphoria (American TV series)
- 52. Manifest (TV series)
Movies
- 15. Spider-Man: No Way Home
- 22. Top Gun: Maverick
- 42. The Batman (film)
- 43. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
- 47. Thor: Love and Thunder
That's 2022 Wrapped Up!
Thank you to everyone who used Wikipedia. Whether you contributed by editing or just read it on your lunch break, you helped make Wikipedia one of the most popular websites in the world.
You can see the full Top 500 viewed pages in Australia here, and more information on the data used in this article can be found here.