In addition to celebrating Christmas, December is customarily a time to reflect on the months that came before it. Today, we look ahead to 2024, according to Wikipedia.
My generation discovered information at your fingertips a little later in life. Even in college, as students, we conducted our research in libraries. With a few keystrokes, one may now learn nearly anything about nearly anything, much like magic.
Amazingly, this year, the English-language edition of Wikipedia was used over 76 billion times worldwide, and that figure just includes clicks through October.
FILE-The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation gave a photo of Erik Menendez on the left from October 31, 2016, and a photo of Lyle Menendez on the right from February 22, 2018. (Source: AP, File; California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)AP
This figure, which Wikipedia uses to calculate what people wanted to know in 2024, is, in my opinion, really astounding.
Alright, let’s guess: events of the year plus English language users. The presidential election should come first, followed by the Olympics.
False.
The top category was deaths in 2024, a curiosity that prompted 44,440,344 page views from people looking up departures, from 94-year-old Canadian pipe organ builder Gabriel Kney to 43-year-old Taiwanese Olympic baseball player Chang Chih-chia.
No. 2 Kamala Harris garnered just under 29 million visits, sparking interest in the presidential contest, which had about 28 million clicks.
It becomes odd now. Kyle and Erik Menendez, who killed their parents in 1989 in California, came in fourth. They generated slightly more than 26 million Wikipedia queries.
Don’t scratch your head if you are. Nine episodes of the brothers’ narrative were made available on Netflix starting in mid-September. The amount of curiosity generated was sufficient to surpass Donald Trump (25 million) and JD Vance (23 million), who came in fifth and seventh, respectively.
The Indian Premier League, ranked sixth with 24.5 million, was in between them. I would have been unaware that it was a cricket league if I hadn’t gone to Wikipedia again.
On Friday, August 9, 2024, in Paris, France, Australia’s Rachael Gunn, also known as B-Girl Raygun, participates in the Round Robin Battle in the 2024 Summer Olympics’ breaking competition at La Concorde Urban Park. (Photo by Frank Franklin for AP)
I’m not an expert on anything, but I’m going to assume that cricket is well-liked in India, a country with 1.4 billion people. One of India’s official languages, English, is spoken by the majority of its citizens. They use Wikipedia to find the most recent information.
I’m speculating here, but I’m supporting my theory with the following: Indian general election (18 million) ranked as the tenth most popular search, surpassing Taylor Swift (17 million).
What else was superior to Taylor Swift?Project 2025 had 19.7 million peeks, whereas Deadpool & Wolverine, a superhero film, had 22 million.
By the way, with 16 million questions each, the 2020 presidential election and the Olympics came in at number 13 and 14, respectively.
President Joe Biden came in at number 19, right below the Netflix film Kalki 2898 AD, which has connections to India. (Note a trend there?) There were roughly 14.5 million requests for each.
On Thursday, December 5, 2024, in Greenvale, New York, President-elect Donald Trump takes the stage prior to his speech at the FOX Nation Patriot Awards. (Heather Khalifa/AP Photo)
Given that the deadline was October, when the presidential election was still imminent, none of this likely shows anything in the grand scheme of things.
Who knows where our searches may lead us as December draws to a close? I hope you enjoy what’s left of this crazy year, wherever that may be.
ESHELMAN, Nancy: [email protected]
Columns by Nancy Eshelman
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