Society

Wikipedia's most-read page, every day of 2025

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What the day's page was

The one page English Wikipedia read most on each day of 2025 — — of the year's 365 days — set as a single paragraph, one block per day, each as wide as the number of times that day's page was opened. The scale is the same from the first block to the last, so a day in March and a day in October mean the same thing. Press play to write the year out. Most days come out at the same quiet width: the middle day of the year drew — views. But on — of them the winner was a page running at a hundred times or more its own ordinary traffic — something the language had not been reading at all until that morning. And a few days take a whole line to themselves. The widest is —, when the page for — was opened — times: — times what it had drawn the day before, and as much as — ordinary days put together. The second widest is —, the day a new pope was elected. The colour is the year's plainest pattern — on — days the most-read page in the language was a person who had died within the previous four. Tap or hover any day.

Data & source

Data: the Most read list English Wikipedia publishes each day through the Wikimedia Feed API (feed/v1/wikipedia/en/featured), one call per day of 2025 · page classes and dates of death from Wikidata (CC0) · pageview counts are CC0; page titles and descriptions are Wikipedia content, CC BY-SA 4.0 · attribution to the Wikimedia Foundation · snapshotted —. Scope: the English-language edition only — this is one language's attention, not the world's, and it leans heavily to the English-speaking countries and to India. It is the calendar year 2025 day by day, less 3 days (—) for which the feed publishes no most-read list at all; those days are absent from the paragraph rather than interpolated. Each day shows the single highest-ranked page; the two behind it appear in the tooltip. Why this list and not the raw ranking: the raw pageviews ranking is topped every day by the Main Page and the search page, and below those by a handful of pages that draw large, steady, non-human traffic from mistyped addresses and crawlers — on more than a quarter of the days of 2025 one of .xxx, Fuck or Google Chrome was in its top five. Rather than invent an exclusion list, this uses the filtered Most read list Wikimedia itself publishes and shows in its apps, which already drops those. The counts are requests, not people: one reader who opens a page twice is counted twice. And the filter does not catch everything. One block in the picture is plainly not reading: 16 April, where the Schutzstaffel page records 7,849,999 requests — 27 times the day's second page and about 1,500 times what it had drawn the day before — with nothing else in that day's list to explain it, in the same week the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre page topped the list three days running on a few hundred thousand views. Both are long-standing targets of automated traffic. It is left in and pointed at rather than quietly deleted, because no rule separates it from the real spikes without also deleting them: 10 September is a bigger, sharper, more isolated jump than 16 April, and it is the most real day in the year. A day's page is coloured by two Wikidata properties and nothing else: instance of (P31) and date of death (P570). “Someone who had just died” means a human whose recorded date of death falls within 4 days before that day — a mechanical rule, so a person who died in 2025 and topped the list again months later is counted as a person, not a death. Pages Wikidata does not class as a human or as a work fall to “something else” — places, companies, holidays, elections, wrestling pay-per-views — and the class is shown in every tooltip so the sorting can be checked. There is deliberately no “an event” class: what turns up here spreads across dozens of Wikidata classes, and a bucket whose membership depends on how many of them got listed would be a judgement wearing a rule's clothes. Wikimedia's day runs on UTC. The table lists all 365 days.