New Delhi: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, gets most of its clicks in India on pages for the terms ‘xxx’, ‘sex’ and ‘xxx_film_series’, according to Google search data sourced by Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia.
According to the data, about 11 percent of Wikipedia’s searches in English are made by Indians, and pages corresponding to the abovementioned terms top the list.
The assessment is based on the number of clicks registered on each page, as recorded by Google’s traffic-evaluation tools, between May and July 2023.
The data shows that while ‘xxx’ was clicked 23.1 lakh times in India over the study period, the number was 22.7 lakh for ‘sex’ and 20.8 lakh for ‘xxx_film_series’.
Needless to say, none of the pages leads to explicit content since Wikipedia is an educational portal.
When one clicks on the ‘xxx’ Wikipedia page among Google search results, they are either directed to a list of different pages with the title — ranging from the Roman numerals for 30, to a feature on the coat of arms of Amsterdam — or to the page for the action Hollywood film series ‘XXX’, which started in 2002.
The data does, however, show that India is not an anomaly in terms of searching for explicit content on the educational portal.
With 12 lakh clicks, ‘xxx’ tops the click list on Wikipedia in Pakistan as well. In Bangladesh, the term ‘xxx’ ranked number 1 with over 9 lakh clicks, and in Sri Lanka, it was the term ‘sex’, with over 64,000.
In Nepal, ‘xxx’ received about 1 lakh clicks, making it the top clicked link there as well.
The non-pornographic term found to inspire most link clicks from May to July was Adipurush, the 2023 release that created controversy over its depiction of the epic Ramayan.
Adipurush fetched around 19 lakh clicks on Wikipedia. The Artificial Intelligence tool ‘ChatGPT’ and The Kerala Story, another controversial film, also topped the charts on Wikipedia searches originating from India.
Also Read: Between consent and coercion: The women powering India’s ‘desi porn’ revolution
Regional-language searches
ThePrint also accessed language-wise search data on Wikipedia for July.
The page for Cleopatra VII — the ancient Egyptian queen better known as just Cleopatra — was the most-viewed in both Hindi and Marathi languages, with 5.74 lakh and 2 lakh clicks, respectively.
When it comes to Tamil, former Tamil Nadu (then Madras State) CM K. Kamaraj’s was the most-viewed page with over 2 lakh clicks, perhaps because his birth anniversary falls on 15 July.
Priyotoma, a popular Bangladeshi romantic-action film released at the end of June, topped the search results in Bengali language with 1.9 lakh clicks.
This report has been updated to reflect a couple of clarifications from Wikimedia Foundation
Also Read: Why it’s time for India to have its own porn star