You know the drill: in the middle of binge-watching a TV series, you grab your phone or laptop and go straight to the show's Wikipedia page. There, you'll dive into the filming locations, characters and plotlines, then 30 minutes later, finally look up when you realise you somehow made your way to the entry for "inventors killed by their own inventions".
Anyway, the Wikipedia rabbit hole is real, especially while watching television. The site confirmed this on Wednesday when editors revealed the most-read English Wikipedia articles of 2017, and seemed fascinated by how many had to do with pop culture, particularly TV.
"It's abundantly clear that @wikipedia has become a second-screen experience for many TV viewers," the site's Twitter account said. "In 2017, over 200 million people stopped by @wikipedia to learn more about what they were watching, like @TheCrownNetflix's Queen Elizabeth or @VictoriaSeries' Queen Victoria."
Netflix's The Crown, an acclaimed drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II (played by Claire Foy), leads this trend. The Queen's Wikipedia page was the third-most-visited entry with 19.2m views, behind only Donald Trump (29.6m) and "deaths in 2017" (37.3m). A Wikipedia editor credited the Queen's popularity to Prince Harry's recent engagement to actress Meghan Markle (No 5 with nearly 17m views), along with the release of The Crown, which started streaming Season 1 in November 2016.
In a discussion of the site's top 50 articles for 2017, the editor wrote that he was most struck by the Queen's prominence, "phenomenal when you consider the fame and ubiquity of many of the entries below her".
