Cleopatra became the most viewed page of the year on Wikipedia: So why?

Strange things are happening with the English version of Wikipedia. The article about Cleopatra, the last queen of Hellenistic Egypt, was recognized as the most viewed page of last year: 55 million.

Sociologist Taha Yasseri of Dublin University College, together with her colleagues, collects statistics for the most viewed articles in the popular online encyclopedia each year. This allows him to analyze trends and examine the most important events in the world. The results of the analysis made according to the 2022 data surprised the expert.

Passed the pages dedicated to great events

It turned out that the article about Cleopatra took the first place in the top 100 most viewed articles on English Wikipedia. It even surpassed the pages dedicated to major world events. These include the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the 2022 FIFA World Cup held in Qatar.

The second row of the most viewed pages list can also be considered a surprise. Because in the second place there is an article about the US serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. However, this situation can at least be explained by the interest of the people. The increase in page traffic (over 54 million views) was in line with the September 21 release of the Netflix series The Beast: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Probably many viewers wanted to know the details about the life of the serial killer.

But there was no high-profile project or announcement about Cleopatra in 2022.

Finally the mystery solved

Entering into the Cleopatra phenomenon research, Taha Yasseri scrambled all the social networks and found a clue. Someone on Twitter mentioned that Google Assistant gave the following phrase as a popular tip for promoting its capabilities to users: Show Cleopatra on Wikipedia (try saying “Show Cleopatra on Wikipedia”).

Google Assistant is very popular and is built into at least 1 billion devices. It is also actively used by 500 million people and even more every month. Users probably really follow the advice of Google Assistant and pronounce the hint, then the corresponding page on Wikipedia opens.

Before Google Assistant became widespread, Cleopatra pageviews on Wikipedia were only around 2.5 million per year.