What the data says about Wikipedia on its 25th anniversary – Pew Research Center

 Short Reads, January 13, 2026

Wikipedia at 25: What the data tells us

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By Skyler Seets, Anna Lieb, and Aaron Smith

On Jan. 15, 2001, the earliest edit found on Wikipedia’s homepage announced, “This is the new WikiPedia!” Twenty-five years later, Wikipedia remains a key source of knowledge on the internet, attracting millions of visitors per day to articles across hundreds of languages.

Since its creation, the site has grown and stayed relevant in a rapidly changing digital environment. Wikipedia is one of the top sources mentioned in Google search results and is used to train large language models that power many artificial intelligence technologies.

Unlike most other high-traffic websites, Wikipedia does not run advertisements and is free to access. It relies on donations from the public and contributions from a community of largely volunteer editors and is hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.

Ahead of Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary, here are answers to some common questions about the site, based on data from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Statistics:

• How big is Wikipedia?
• How many languages are there on Wikipedia?
• How many people visit Wikipedia?
• What are the most-viewed pages of the last decade?
• What are the most-viewed pages each month?
• Which pages have been edited the most?
• Which pages have had the most views or edits in a single day?
• How many people contribute to Wikipedia?

How we did this?

This study looks at key statistics about Wikipedia for its 25th anniversary. Pew Research Center did a similar study of the languages used on the site for its 15th anniversary in 2016.

This analysis is based on information compiled by Wikipedia or collected with the Wikimedia Analytics API. Some figures are available on the public statistics website of the Wikimedia Foundation. Unless otherwise noted, the findings are for the English-language version of the site.

Where possible, the analysis covers the entire history of the site. But we show some statistics (such as page views) starting in 2015 due to changes in how they are calculated or data availability. We accessed data for this analysis in December 2025.

When determining which pages have had the most views, we excluded several popular pages. Among these are the articles for YouTube and Facebook, which Wikipedia excludes from its official metrics because their views are considered to most likely be accidental. It also excludes the article for Cleopatra, which researchers say has seen inflated view counts due to Google’s voice assistant using it as an example query.

All page view analysis counts human user views and excludes automated traffic and bot activity. In addition to Wikipedia’s own measures of bots, we also excluded any page for which the share of mobile views is less than 5% or higher than 95%. Other research has shown that excessively high or low mobile traffic signals bot activity.

How big is Wikipedia?

As of December 2025, there are over 66 million articles across all languages on Wikipedia. The text, images, videos and other uploaded files for those articles take up roughly 775 terabytes of storage. That is equal to the storage capacity of around 3,000 iPhones.

Around 7 million articles are in English, which is the language with the most articles on the site. With a total word count of over 5 billion words, it would take one person about 38 years to read every English Wikipedia article.

How many languages are there on Wikipedia?

Wikipedia was initially published in English, but editions in other languages soon followed. As of late 2025, the site has articles in 342 languages.

Many of the largest Wikipedia editions other than English, such as French and German, have existed for much of the site’s history. Other languages have grown in recent years because automated bots are creating pages in those languages.

For example, Lsjbot is an automated program built by linguist Sverker Johansson that creates articles in Cebuano and Swedish. Cebuano – a language spoken in the southern Philippines – now has the second-most Wikipedia articles of any language, despite having relatively few active users.

In the past decade, Wikipedia articles have been viewed a total of 1.9 trillion times. That is about 508 million views per day on average. About half (49%) of these views are for the English Wikipedia.

Some of the world’s most-spoken languages have relatively few Wikipedia page views. For example, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi are the second and third most-spoken languages in the world, but their Wikipedias rank eighth and 25th, respectively, in all-time page views. (Wikipedia has been blocked in mainland China since April 2019, though a similar Chinese site called Baidu Baike is available there.)

In addition to these human visits, bots also direct lots of traffic to Wikipedia. Web crawlers, AI bots and other nonhuman agents produced more than 88 billion views in 2025 alone. In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that human pageviews were down by roughly 8% compared with the same months in 2024, a trend it attributes to the rise in generative AI and AI search summaries.

Related: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results

Continue/Read Original Article Here: What the data says about Wikipedia on its 25th anniversary | Pew Research Center

The oldest Baby Boomers turn 80 in 2026 – Pew Research Center

January 9, 2026

The oldest Baby Boomers turn 80 in 2026

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By Richard Fry

Baby Boomers will soon reach another milestone: In 2026, the oldest members of this generation will turn 80.

The Baby Boom generation refers to adults born between 1946 and 1964. The name reflects the sharp and prolonged increase in fertility that occurred in the wake of World War II.

About this research

The United States saw a total of 76 million births during the boom, with the annual number surpassing 4 million in 1954 and remaining above that level until 1965. The annual number of births would not surpass 4 million again until 1989.

Besides marking the end of the Baby Boom generation, 1964 also marked the peak of the generation as a share of the total U.S. population. The Census Bureau estimated that there were 72.5 million Baby Boomers on July 1, 1964, accounting for 37% of the population.

While Boomers peaked as a share of the population in 1964, their absolute number peaked at 79 million in 1999. This increase was due to increased immigration to the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century.

So how many Boomers are there today? As of July 1, 2024 – the most recent available data – there were an estimated 67 million Boomers, accounting for only 20% of the nation’s population.

The Census Bureau also periodically releases projections of the U.S. population. The bureau projects that the Boomer population will be about 1 million in 2062, when the youngest turn 98.

Related: U.S. centenarian population is projected to quadruple over the next 30 years

Topics

• Baby Boomers
• Older Adults & Aging

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The oldest Baby Boomers turn 80 in 2026 | Pew Research Center

Why Americans Leave, Stay in Their Childhood Religion – Pew Research Center

Religious Landscape Study, Report. December 15, 2025

Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion While Others Stay?

Study shows most Americans who leave their childhood religion do so by age 30

By Becka A. Alper, Patricia Tevington, Asta Kallo and Jeff Diamant

About this research

Many U.S. adults (35%) have moved on from the religion of their youth. Yet most Americans have not, including a majority – 56% – who still identify with their childhood religion. Another 9% weren’t raised in a religion and still don’t have one today.

This Pew Research Center report looks at the choices behind these decisions: why some people continue to identify with their childhood religion, why others have decided to leave it, and why others don’t identify with any religion at all.

The findings about how many people switch religions come from our U.S. Religious Landscape Study (RLS) conducted in 2023-24. But to dig deeper into the reasons people give for switching or staying, we conducted a follow-up survey in May 2025.

The follow-up survey shows that most U.S. adults who still identify with their childhood religion credit the following as extremely or very important reasons:

• They believe the religion’s teachings (64% of adults who identify with their childhood religion say this).
• Their religion fulfills their spiritual needs (61%).
• Their religion gives their life meaning (56%).

Fewer say that other reasons – such as a sense of community (44%), familiarity (39%), traditions (39%), or the religion’s teachings on social and political issues (32%) – are extremely or very important reasons why they continue to identify with their childhood religion as adults.1

Among Protestants who have held onto their religious identities, 70% cite belief in their religion’s teachings as a key reason why they are Protestant today. Most lifelong Protestants also say they are Protestants today because their faith meets their spiritual needs and gives their life meaning.2

Among Catholics who have held onto their religious identities, 54% say a key reason they are Catholic today is because it fulfills their spiritual needs, 53% cite belief in the religion’s teachings, and 47% say it’s because it gives their life meaning.

Lifelong Jews most commonly mention a somewhat different set of reasons for why they are Jewish. Among U.S. adults who were raised Jewish and still identify as Jewish by religion, 60% say liking the traditions is an extremely or very important reason they are Jewish, and 57% cite liking the sense of community. About half of Jews say they are Jewish because it’s their family religion and/or because it’s something they’re familiar with.

(There were not enough respondents from other groups – such as people raised Muslim who still identify as Muslim, or people raised Buddhist who are still Buddhist – for us to be able to analyze their responses separately.)

Americans’ choices to stay in or leave their childhood religion also are tied to their religious upbringing, their age and their political leanings.

Reasons people say they left their childhood religion

We asked a different group of Americans, those saying they had left their childhood religion, to evaluate the importance of various factors that may have led them to leave. This group includes Americans who were raised in one religion and have switched to another religion (10% of U.S. adults) as well as those who no longer identify with any religion (20%).

Americans who’ve left their childhood religion most commonly cite the following as extremely or very important reasons behind their decision:

• They stopped believing in the religion’s teachings (cited by 46% of people who were raised in a religion and have left that religion).
• It wasn’t important in their life (38%).
• They just gradually drifted away (38%).

About a third of people in this group say their religion’s teachings about social and political issues (34%) or scandals involving clergy or religious leaders (32%) were important reasons for leaving the religion in which they were raised.3

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Why Americans Leave, Stay in Their Childhood Religion | Pew Research Center

“a recent #PewResearchCenter study on digital decay found that 38 percent of #webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today.

This happens because pages are taken down, #URLs are changed, and entire #websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of #ScientificJournals and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for #news”

<https://theverge.com/24321569/internet-decay-link-rot-web-archive-deleted-culture>

Top data visualizations of 2025, from Pew Research Center’s designers – Pew Research Center

Our favorite data visualizations of 2025

December 15, 2025, By Alissa Scheller

Every year, designers at Pew Research Center create hundreds of charts, maps and other data visualizations. We also help make a range of other digital products, from “scrollytelling” features to quizzes based on our research and large interactive databases.

All of these products are aimed at communicating our research findings clearly and concisely. Our graphics must have clear takeaways and engage readers. They also must be easily viewed on small screens, especially as smartphones have become so widespread.

Ultimately, our graphics should tell a story about our research, whether it’s about changing media habits or shifting social norms. Below, we’ll highlight a few of our favorite visuals from 2025 and walk through how we made them and what makes them successful.

Related: Striking findings from 2025

Showing shifts over time with alluvial diagrams

Alluvial diagrams are named after the alluvial “fans” that naturally form in sediment from streams of water. Sometimes called Sankey diagrams, they’re a unique way of showing changes over time. They allow us to show changes in the composition of various categories of data between two points in time.

In the two examples below, bars and columns represent the categories in each year, while the flows between them show changes in the composition of those categories. We could easily show this data as a simple bar or column chart, but alluvial diagrams allow us to show not only that shifts happened, but also how they happened.

The first graphic shows how the American electorate shifted between 2020 and 2024, leading to President Donald Trump’s return to the White House:

This chart uses a paneled version of an alluvial diagram to highlight different voter flows between 2020 and 2024. In both the static and interactive versions of the visualization, we walk readers through the decisions that three categories of Americans – 2020 Trump voters, 2020 Biden voters and 2020 nonvoters – made in 2024. With this type of diagram, we can show how relatively small changes drove a larger electoral shift.

Alluvial diagrams are particularly useful for survey data that comes from the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of U.S. adults who agree to take our polls regularly. With a survey panel like the ATP, we’re able to poll the same people regularly, and alluvial diagrams allow us to show how their attitudes and experiences have – or have not – changed over time.

We also used an alluvial diagram – albeit in a slightly different way – to visualize how Israeli Jewish adults have switched their affiliation within Judaism since childhood. The diagram below shows how Israeli people were raised and how they currently identify:

At the Center, we don’t use alluvial diagrams often. But when called for, they can be a powerful way of breaking down changes in various categories over time. We’ve also used them to show shifts in U.S. public opinion about China, acquittal and conviction rates in federal trials, and how the number of women’s colleges in the United States has declined over time. 

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Top data visualizations of 2025, from Pew Research Center’s designers | Pew Research Center

Weekly output: Mozilla Firefox CEO, AI crawlers vs. publishers and creators, teenage AI chatbot use, Android Live Emergency Video, PCMag’s best tech bought in 2025, World App

Somehow I’m down to the last full workweek of the year–and yet my writing and gift shopping seem to have more than a week’s worth of work remaining.

12/8/2025: Mozilla is doing a delicate dance with AI, Fast Company

I spoke with Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers at a Web Summit event for the second time this year. One thing Firefox’s management no longer needs to worry about, unlike when I met with Chambers at Web Summit Qatar in February: the threat of Google being forced to stop paying browser developers to keep its search engine as the default.

12/9/2025: AI Platforms Are Paying (Some) Big Publishers, Leaving Smaller Ones Behind, PCMag

This post began with me taking notes from a Web Summit panel featuring Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince talking about that Internet infrastructure company’s Pay Per Crawl initiative to push AI providers to pay Web publishers for access to their content, then I did some follow-up reporting that included setting up Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control bot-blocking filter on this blog, and then I had to update the post the morning it was published after the European Commission opened an investigation into how Google runs its AI Overview search feature.

12/9/2025: 28% of Teens Use Chatbots Daily. You Can Probably Guess Which One They Like Best, PCMag

The latest survey by the Pew Research Center surfaced some interesting statistics about how much teenagers use AI chatbots and which ones they use the most.

12/10/2025: Need Help? Android Phones Can Now Share Live Video With 911 Dispatchers, PCMag

Google is shipping this feature a year after Apple did, but its emergency live video implementation works on far more devices than Apple’s.

12/11/2025: The Best Tech PCMag Editors Bought in 2025, PCMag

I wrote a short graf lauding the compact, quick-charging (and Wirecutter-endorsed) USB-C charger that I bought after losing the considerably bulkier model that came with my laptop.

12/13/2025: App That Verifies Your Existence Adds Encrypted Messaging, PCMag

Tools for Humanity announced an update to its World App that adds an end-to-end-encrypted chat feature and expands its cryptocurrency tools. I took advantage of this news peg to try out the app’s ability to verify a “World ID” by scanning the NFC tag on my U.S. passport; that did not go well at all for me.

12/15/2025: Updated to add the PCMag best-tech package that I forgot to check for on Sunday.

#AIChatbot #AIOverview #AISearch #ChatGPT #Firefox #GoogleZero #Mozilla #PayPerCrawl #PewResearchCenter #ToolsForHumanity #WebSummit #WorldApp #WorldID

Three in 10 US teens use AI chatbots every day, but safety concerns are growing

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/09/three-in-ten-u-s-teens-use-ai-chatbots-every-day-but-safety-concerns-are-growing/

Fewer Americans follow the news closely now than in 2016 – Pew Research Center

• Short Reads

December 3, 2025

Americans are following the news less closely than they used to

By Naomi Forman-Katz

The share of Americans who say they follow the news all or most of the time has decreased since 2016, according to nearly a decade’s worth of Pew Research Center surveys. This shift comes amid changes in the platforms people use for news and declining trust in news organizations. How we did this…

As of August 2025, 36% of U.S. adults say they follow the news all or most of the time. That is down from 51% in 2016, the first time we asked this question.

In turn, growing shares of Americans say they follow the news less closely:

• 38% now say they follow it some of the time, up from 31% in 2016.
• 18% say they follow it only now and then, compared with 12% in 2016.

Meanwhile, the share who say they hardly ever follow the news has been relatively stable (7% in 2025, 5% in 2016).

People in every age group are less likely now than in 2016 to say they follow the news all or most of the time. But older Americans remain more likely than younger adults to do so. 

For example, 62% of adults 65 and older now say they follow the news all or most of the time. That’s down 13 percentage points since 2016.

The decline is similar – 12 points – among adults under 30. However, this age group followed the news much less closely to begin with: 15% now say they follow the news all or most of the time, down from 27% in 2016.

This decline in Americans’ attention to the news over the years has also occurred across other demographic groups, including education, gender, race, ethnicity and political party. But the drop has been steeper for some groups than others.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Fewer Americans follow the news closely now than in 2016 | Pew Research Center

#AgeGroups #Americans #August2025 #LessNews #News #NewsSources #Newspapers #Pew #PewResearchCenter #Research

Donald Trump’s social network Truth Social (a Mastodon variant) is familiar with mainstream America 🇺🇸, but does the site rival progressive social alternatives like Bluesky‽

https://darnell.tv/2025/11/28/truth-social-mastodon-bluesky/