Short answers, pulled from the story.
In the 2001 census, 390,127 people in England and Wales listed Jedi as their religion, making it the fourth-largest reported religion in the country. More than 70,000 Australians (0.37%) and over 53,000 New Zealanders (1.5%) gave the same answer, and 21,000 Canadians entered Jedi Knight.
A chain email circulated before the 2001 censuses in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom, claiming that any religion reaching a threshold of 8,000 to 10,000 responses would receive official government recognition. That claim was false, but the email spread widely enough to prompt hundreds of thousands of responses.
In England and Wales, no penalty applied to the religion question under section 1(2) of the Census (Amendment) Act 2000, which amended section 8 of the Census Act 2000. Elsewhere, while providing false census information can be illegal, prosecutions over Jedi responses were rare or absent.
No. In England and Wales, Jedi Knight was assigned its own processing code (896), but the Office for National Statistics stated this only meant it had been logged as a common answer, not that it had been granted official recognition. Australia classified Jedi responses as "not defined".
Numbers fell sharply in most countries after the 2001 peak. In England and Wales, responses dropped from 390,127 in 2001 to 176,632 in 2011 and fewer than 1,600 by 2021. Australia fell from over 70,000 in 2001 to close to 48,000 in 2016. New Zealand dropped from over 53,000 in 2001 to around 20,000 by 2006.
Sociologist of religion Adam Possamai discussed Jediism in his book Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament, placing it within a methodological classification he called "hyper-real religions". His study also argued that the official response to Jedi census answers demonstrated hostility toward new religions in Australia.