Wikipedia renamed Jungkook. 72% still arrive at the old name
English Wikipedia moved his article to Jung Kook in March 2025. Seventeen months on, 4.09m of the 5.77m reads about him land on the old title. Of the 30 most-read Korean stars, only he is reached mostly by a dropped name.
The table this is written from: /name-spelled
English Wikipedia moved the article about BTS’s youngest member on 15 March 2025. It had been at Jungkook; it became Jung Kook. The old title stayed behind as a redirect, which is what Wikipedia always does, and the world went on typing it.
Seventeen months later, here is where the reading actually lands.
| Title | Reads, June 2023 to September 2026 |
|---|---|
| Jungkook — the old title, now a redirect | 4,089,795 |
| Jung Kook — the article | 1,608,357 |
| 20 other redirects | 68,313 |
| All titles | 5,766,465 |
72.1% of the reading about him arrives at a name the encyclopedia stopped using, and the old title out-reads the new one by 2.5 to 1.
He is the only one of thirty
We took the 30 most-read Korean stars we hold, asked Wikipedia’s API which article each name resolves to and what redirects point at it, and summed the reads for every title. That is 30 people and several hundred titles.
For 29 of them the answer is dull, which is the finding. The median share arriving by redirect is 0.2%. Readers land on the article title itself.
| Person | Titles counted | Share arriving by a redirect |
|---|---|---|
| Jungkook | 22 | 72.1% |
| Jun | 7 | 48.5% |
| J.Y. Park | 14 | 32.3% |
| Suga | 16 | 16.2% |
| RM | 10 | 9.2% |
| Kim Seok-jin | 21 | 8.5% |
| median of all 30 | — | 0.2% |
| Park Ji-hyun | 3 | 0% |
| Pom Klementieff | 2 | 0% |
Only one person in the thirty is read mostly through a name that is no longer the article’s.
What a redirect share is actually measuring
A high share means the name a reader knows and the name the encyclopedia chose are not the same string. Three things produce that, and they look identical in this data.
A rename is one: the article moves and the traffic does not follow, which is Jungkook’s case and the only one here with a move log entry to prove it.
A stage name against a legal name is another. Jun sits at 48.5% because the article is under one form of his name while readers arrive through several others. Nothing was renamed; the names simply coexist.
Romanisation is the third. Korean names reach English in more than one spelling, and readers type the one they saw first.
The share cannot tell these apart on its own. The move log can, for the first kind, and that is why we looked it up rather than describing the rename as recent or long-standing from memory.
Why we were counting redirects at all
This began as a mistake in our own work.
Building a different piece two days ago, we counted each member’s reads from their main article alone. RM came out at 184,204 reads and Suga at 354,555 — six to twelve times below their real figures, because we had asked for the wrong titles and because most of their traffic was sitting under redirects we never requested. The numbers looked wrong next to their neighbours, which is the only reason we checked.
The fix was to stop naming titles ourselves and ask the API for the full redirect list. Doing that across thirty people produced this piece: the discarded half of the data turned out to hold a measurable fact about how people search for Korean names.
Redirect traffic is normally thrown away. For 29 of these 30 people, throwing it away costs almost nothing. For one, it loses 72% of him.
The seven-member table this grew out of, and everything that measure cannot say, is on the page behind it.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikimedia — Pageviews API, en.wikipedia, all-access, user agents only, monthly, 2023-06-01 to 2026-09-01, summed per title · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
- Wikipedia — MediaWiki API — action=query&redirects=1 to find each person's article, prop=redirects&rdlimit=max for every redirect pointing at it, and list=logevents&letype=move for the date a title was moved · https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
What we checked
- The rename date is read from Wikipedia's own move log, not inferred: Jungkook to Jung Kook on 2025-03-15. We do not describe it as recent or long ago without that date beside it
- Redirect reads are not double counting. The pageviews API records a request to a redirect title under that title, so a person's reads are split across titles until they are summed
- Only namespace 0 titles are summed. Talk pages and user pages carry the same words and would inflate a person's total
- The measure is a share, so it does not reward being widely read. J.Y. Park at 329,604 total reads and Jungkook at 5,766,465 are compared on the same scale
- 30 people, all measured — no one was dropped for missing data. Every person's title count is printed so a low share can be told apart from a thin count
- This started as a defect in our own work. Counting only main articles made two other people look six to twelve times less read than they are, which is what sent us looking at redirect traffic in the first place
What we left out, and why
- What anyone typed into a search box. We can see which page title a reader arrived at, not the words they searched
- Search engines that resolve an alternative spelling to the main article. Those arrivals are counted as main-article reads, so redirect shares here are floors
- Whether either spelling is correct. Wikipedia's naming rules are its own, and this piece takes no position on them
- Popularity. This is which spelling readers arrive at, not how many people like someone
- Other language editions. English Wikipedia is one of many, and romanisation differs in each
- Anything after 2026-09-01, the last month in the window
The data behind this
Written from the same data
Take this away — 10 cards
The figures in this article, as images. Free to repost with the address on them.
If you work in this business
Everything on this page is measured from the same weekly Netflix lists, per market and per title. We publish the pages free; what we sell is the same measurement cut to one company's catalogue — including the figures behind /name-spelled and /streak-vs-read.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →