You can kinda see how the lightbulb appeared over Jimmy Wales head with Fandom

Most popular = lowest common denominator, but that is not really as bad as it sounds. It's perfectly possible that everyone clicking on these general interest topics is also reading about something more niche or educational at the same time, but because we are all not reading about the same educational thing those results don't show up.

"Most viewed" is a very incomplete statistic. I often "view" pages just to look up something like "is this film worth watching?" or "what else has this person directed and is worth watching?" – kind of like a reference similar to imdb, except without imdb's clunky interface.

But this "view" isn't really a "read". There are other pages I've also read much more in-depth, and in terms of "time spent" it would probably rank much higher.

I'm sure some people do read these pages more in-depth too, but there's no real way to tell who is using them merely as a reference and who is actually reading them.

Back when phone books were common it was probably the most "viewed" book.