In brief: Wikipedia entries shouldn't be taken as gospel, but it is a good place to start when researching a topic or navigating a rabbit hole. And in 2020, plenty of people turned to the online encyclopedia to learn more about two key topics of interest: the Covid-19 pandemic and the US presidential election.
According to Wikipedia's annual list of the most-popular English articles, seven of the top 10 Wikipedia articles of 2020 were about either the pandemic or the election. Topping the list was the entry for "Covid-19 pandemic" which has amassed more than 83 million pageviews (as of December 15, 2020).
Outside of the pandemic and politics, users were also curious about those who died in 2020 including NBA legend Kobe Bryant, Indian actor Sushant Singh Rajput and American actor Chadwick Boseman.
In the tech category, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk placed 12th with more than 21 million pageviews while YouTube ranked 23rd with just north of 15 million pageviews.
The top 10 results alone generated some 392 million pageviews. According to the most recent statistics, the English version of Wikipedia consists of 6.2 million articles.
The list largely mirroring what we saw in Google's annual Year in Search report earlier this month.
Wikipedia plans to update the list again in early January to reflect the final two weeks of the year.