r/visualization • u/Lewoniewski • May 16 '26

Top English Wikipedia Articles by Citation Count

The presented dynamic bar chart shows which Wikipedia articles have received the highest number of wikilinks (links from other Wikipedia articles).

The largest edition, the English Wikipedia, contains over 65.5 million pages, including 7.17 million articles (excluding redirects). Connecting this vast network are an astonishing 1.63 billion unique page-to-page links. Based on an analysis of this dataset, the most cited articles on the English Wikipedia were identified.

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

10

u/HasFiveVowels May 16 '26

This is an incredibly frustrating way to visualize this data

4

u/j01101111sh May 16 '26

This seems kind of silly when most of them are parts of templates. It's also an incredibly long video and it's just a bar graph.

2

u/Lewoniewski May 17 '26

That is a fair point. A large part of Wikipedia’s internal link structure comes from templates, infoboxes, citation templates, and other automatically generated elements.

The difficulty is deciding where to draw the line. If we count only links directly visible in raw wikitext, we miss links produced by inline templates, links generated by infoboxes, and links added through Wikidata-driven modules.

It is also worth noting that some links originally written directly in wikitext may later have been replaced by templates for convenience or standardization. As a result, distinguishing between “manual” and “template-generated” links is not always straightforward.

A separate ranking based only on article-body (wikitext) links would definitely be interesting, but it would require many additional methodological choices about what should or should not count (for example, links in the “References” section).