By Josh Greene, The Mather Group

This month’s Wikipedia Chaos Index sits at 49, a significant drop from last month. This is mostly due to a drop in a few specific categories, including a significant drop in AfC wait times.

Last month saw the highest number of draft page declines we’ve ever measured (following a particularly high month of newly submitted pages), as Wikipedia editors focused on clearing out the queue, leading to an overall reduction in wait times for new page submissions.
As is often the case in Q4, Wikipedia’s overall level of activity was slightly lower than we typically see in Q1 and Q3 (generally the busiest quarter of every year).

To close out each year, Wikipedia releases the data on the 25 most-viewed pages of the past 12 months, often a mix of popular culture moments, recently deceased celebrities, and important world events.

Leading the way in 2023, with 49,490,406 pageviews on the English Wikipedia, was ChatGPT – no surprise considering how AI dominated the conversation in just about every corner of industry and culture this year. ‘Deaths in 2023’ was the 2nd most popular page, with 42.7 million views – nearly 7 million less than ChatGPT, an enormous gulf between the first and second positions.
The rest of the top 20 included anything from the 2023 Cricket World Cup (3rd) to Oppenheimer (5th) to Matthew Perry (17th) and Elon Musk (19th). The statistics also included the top countries accessing the English Wikipedia overall, a great reminder of how prolific and integral Wikipedia is to the modern internet: the United States (33.2 billion views) followed by the United Kingdom (9 billion) and India (8.48 billion).

NOTE: The Chaos Index is a proprietary metric for measuring turbulence throughout Wikipedia and tracking the community’s current sentiment towards corporate-related pages. The index measures community actions such as editing frequency, content deletion, message board posts, and many other activities that contribute to unstable corporate page environments.