wikipedia user agent based logs are not a reliable source, and from this source it seems to me the closest competitor is linux other with 4 times more hits than ubuntu.
Funny that distrowatch stopped being used as reference by ubuntu followers since ubuntu fell from the top to make room for mint and debian, /r/linux survey data doesn't corroborate wikipedia data either.
Funny thing that I actually moved away from ubuntu several years ago, and from gnome a little bit before that and
I wonder where you got your data, the 2013 /r/linux survey found out: "Just like last year, there is a lot of variety in what /r/Linux is using as it's graphical environment of choice with "Other" being the top category. The top three are KDE 4, Gnome 3, and XFCE. (...)
KDE 4.x was third last year. This year it moved up to first place.
For the second year in a row Unity wins "Most Hated Environment" of /r/Linux, followed by GNOME 3, KDE 4, and then KDE 3.
And gnome is well known for telling their users they're stupid and clueless, but I don't remember reading such a thing from kde in the ten years I've been using it.