The Top Most Viewed Wikipedia Articles of 2012

It appears Internet users living in the U.S. are most interested in social networking, steamy books, and popular movies. That's one of the many conclusions you can draw from a Top 10 list of the most viewed articles on Wikipedia in 2012.

Johan Gunnarsson, a former student in Computer Science and Engineering at Lund Institute of Technology in Lund, Sweden and current programmer compiled various lists of the most popular Wikipedia articles, which he broke down by language. Here are the top topics on English Wikipedia:

1. Facebook: 32,647,942 views
2. Wiki: 29,613,759 views
3. Deaths in 2012: 25,418,587 views
4. One Direction: 22,351,637 views
5. The Avengers (2012 film): 22,268,644 views
6. Fifty Shades of Grey: 21,779,423 views
7. 2012 phenomenon: 20,619,920 views
8. The Dark Knight Rises: 18,882,885 views
9. Google: 18,508,719 views
10. The Hunger Games: 18,431,626

It's an interesting mix of articles, though mostly topical, dealing with movies that came out during the past year and concerns over the end of the world (2012 phenomenon). It's also telling that Facebook came out on top, though Americans aren't the only ones addicted to social networking.

Facebook also topped the Spanish Wikipedia and appears on several other lists, including German, French, Portuguese, Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Romanian, and Hebrew Wikipedias (and possibly others -- the lists appear in their native languages).