Wikipedia in 2025: English Read About Deaths, Spanish About the Pope, Russian About Russia

Wikipedia publishes how often every one of its pages is opened, and at the end of each year the Wikimedia Foundation turns that record into a list of what English-language readers looked up most. The 2025 list is out. What nobody publishes is the same list for the other large editions, so we counted those ourselves from the same data, using the screening rules the Foundation and its volunteers apply to their own annual list. The result is five charts: the most-read articles in English, Spanish and Russian, plus every edition ranked by pageviews and by article edits.

Three languages, three different years

The top of each list barely overlaps. English opened 2025 with the running list of people who had died, on 49,617,383 views, followed by the activist Charlie Kirk on 46,493,112. Spanish put the new pope first: Leo XIV drew 5,996,054 views, of which 2,236,479 arrived under his birth name, Robert Prevost. Russian readers also went to the list of the year deaths first, on 5,592,837, then to the article about their own country, on 4,266,994.

Only two subjects appear on all three lists. One is Donald Trump, ranked 4 in English, 5 in Spanish and 6 in Russian. The other is the article about the United States, 13, 17 and 16. Ed Gein, the American murder case a Netflix series returned to the screen, is third in English on 33,000,749 and second in Spanish on 4,913,636, but nowhere in the Russian twenty.

What each language reads about

The Spanish list is the most religious and the most sporting at once. 4 popes are in it, Leo XIV, Francis on 4,838,563, John Paul II on 2,411,748 and Benedict XVI on 2,385,880, and six entries are football, from Cristiano Ronaldo to Lionel Messi. The one entry that is neither a person, a place nor an event is the periodic table, fourth on 3,644,054 views, which looks like homework rather than news.

The Russian list leans on history and on television. Alexander Pushkin drew 2,302,417 views and the Soviet Union 2,280,206, while Squid Game takes two places, its second season on 3,281,123 and the main series article on 2,348,105. English is the list most shaped by films and television, with ten entries from the cinema and streaming according to the Foundation.

Counting readers is harder than it sounds

Raw pageview data is full of traffic that no human produced. The Foundation removes pages whose share of desktop views drops below 2 percent or climbs above 80 percent, because those extremes go with botnets, and it also removes pages that collect huge numbers of visits with no referring page, which mostly means articles about websites. Applying the same rules to Russian removed the article about Yandex, which recorded 101,834,629 views, about 18.2 times the most-read article that survives the screen.

The screening also removes genuine reading. The English article about ChatGPT was opened 42,833,025 times in 2025 and appears on no official list. We tested the method before trusting it: run over English, it returned all twenty-five articles the Foundation published, which is why the Spanish and Russian lists here are worth reading as close to official rather than as guesses.

English is more than half of Wikipedia

Across the 348 editions that were open in 2025, readers opened 166,127,577,423 pages. English alone served 85,541,514,536 of them, 51.5 percent, more than every other language put together. Japanese is second on 10,926,145,508 and Russian third on 9,313,400,132. French and Spanish are effectively tied, 16,555,240 views apart.

Writing is even more concentrated than reading. People made 94,174,629 edits to articles in 2025, and 39.6 percent of them landed on English Wikipedia, more than the next eleven editions combined. The two rankings do not match: Japanese is the second most-read edition but seventh by edits, at 3,173 views for every human edit, against 2,293 in English and 492 in Hebrew, the most heavily edited of the twenty relative to its traffic.

One number puts the rest in proportion. Bots made 31,563,306 further edits to articles in 2025, a quarter of every change an article received, and the people who made the other three quarters numbered close to 250,000 in the first half of the year.