Why were people identifying as Jedi knights in censuses around the world?

Was it their love for the Star Wars franchise or just a ploy to annoy census takers? Either way, these rebels were a surprise data set in UK’s 2001 census.

Counting people remains a difficult task. With domestic and foreign migration, political motives for staying off the radar, and simple human error and miscommunication, there is no way to ensure absolute accuracy.

The jokesters don’t help. In the 2001 UK census, 390,127 people described themselves as Jedi knights from Star Wars, when asked to state their religion. By 2011, that number had dropped to 176,632, but the global tally was rising, as similar responses popped up in Australia, Canada and the Czech Republic, among other countries.

In the 2021 UK count, fewer than 1,600 identified as Jedi knights. The others likely felt the joke had run its course. But what will future generations make of it all? Perhaps by then there will be methods of tabulation so different, our entire census exercise will seem as quaint as the ancient Inca empire's system of recording its population, among other data, in the form of knots on cords.