What the data says about Wikipedia on its 25th anniversary – Pew Research Center
(Photo illustration by Thomas Fuller / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Short Reads, January 13, 2026
Wikipedia at 25: What the data tells us
By Skyler Seets, Anna Lieb, and Aaron Smith
(Photo illustration by Thomas Fuller / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
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 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
Read more: What the data says about Wikipedia on its 25th anniversary – Pew Research CenterContinue/Read Original Article Here: What the data says about Wikipedia on its 25th anniversary | Pew Research Center
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