Wikipedia earlier this month released its list of the 25 most viewed articles on English Wikipedia in 2023. As always, it’s a good sign of the times.
There’s a lot of what you’d expect on the list. The Barbie movie is on there (No. 13, with 18 million views). Taylor Swift, unsurprisingly, made the cut at No. 12 (19.4 million views). Movies, soccer players, celebrities who passed away too young, all made it. (Matthew Perry is at No. 17 with 16.4 million views, and Lisa Marie Presley is at No. 22 with 13.7 million.)
But the No. 1 most-viewed article, with a whopping 49.4 million views? It’s Wikipedia’s entry on ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched just over a year ago on Nov. 30, 2022. With its clever responses and ability to engage in a humanlike conversation, it captured the public’s attention and set off a wide-ranging conversation that’s still going strong 12 months later.
ChatGPT isn’t the only genAI chatbot out there. Microsoft’s Bing, for instance, began integrating AI into search in February and opened to more users in May. Google Bard also opened up to bigger audiences. (In a breakdown of the three services in the spring, CNET’s Imad Khan found ChatGPT to be the best, but noted that all three were learning and changing.) And there are yet more, including Character.ai and Claude.ai (the latter created by people who jumped from OpenAI).
Still, it’s ChatGPT that became the touchstone for many people when they think of AI — which we’re all probably doing a lot more than we did a year ago. Hence the enshrinement atop Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia and hugely popular resource. Students turn to it for homework help, sports and movie fans to answer those nagging trivia questions, job-seekers use it to research potential employers, and for most anyone, it’s much too easy to simply fall down a random-article rabbit hole and not emerge for hours. Wikipedia received more than 84 billion page views so far in 2023, according to data shared with…
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