Search for information on Pope Leo smashed Wikipedia record

The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports Wikipedia, stated that Pope Leo’s profile is the fifth-most-read page in English on the site this year. The foundation released its list of “most read articles” on December 2.

Wikimedia also highlighted that one of the deaths that had the biggest impact during 2025 was that of Pope Francis.

“The Catholic Church selected his successor, Pope Leo XIV, a few weeks later. As people rushed online to learn about Leo, traffic to all Wikimedia projects peaked at around 800,000 hits per second, more than six times over normal traffic levels and a new all-time record for us,” the foundation noted.

“Plenty of people also came to learn more about Francis’ life, too,” it added, noting that his English Wikipedia page ranks 11th among the most read pages this year.

Wikipedia, which defines itself as “a free online encyclopaedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki”, is one of the most visited websites in the world. According to Statista, in 2025 it ranked fifth behind Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Google also released its list of trends in its “Year in Search 2025” recently. In its “people” section, Pope Leo XIV ranked fifth worldwide, and among news searches, the election of the new pope ranked fourth.

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Pope Leo XIV among the most viewed and searched on Wikipedia and Google in 2025 (By David Ramos/Catholic News Agency)