In October 2025 the Wikimedia Foundation reported that human pageviews to Wikipedia had fallen roughly 8% year over year (Wikimedia Foundation, New User Trends on Wikipedia 2025), even as the AI systems draining that traffic grew more dependent on Wikipedia than ever. Wikipedia now supplies about 47.9% of ChatGPT’s top citations (Profound / 5W Public Relations 2025), and non-human agents produced more than 88 billion views on Wikimedia sites in 2025 alone (Pew Research Center, Wikipedia at 25 2026). Meanwhile the English edition crossed 7.21 million articles and the Foundation raised $208.6 million in fiscal year 2024-2025 (Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Statistics 2026; Wikimedia Foundation, FY2024-2025 Audit Report 2025). This analysis consolidates data from the Wikimedia Foundation, Pew Research Center, the English Wikipedia statistics dashboards, Similarweb, and 8 other primary sources into a single reference for 2026.
TL;DR
- English Wikipedia holds 7,209,792 articles as of July 2026, about 10.6% of all Wikipedia content (Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Statistics 2026).
- All language editions together hold roughly 67.9 million articles across 347 active Wikipedias (Wikipedia, List of Wikipedias 2026).
- Human pageviews fell about 8% in 2025 versus 2024, blamed on AI search summaries and social video (Wikimedia Foundation, New User Trends on Wikipedia 2025).
- Bots and AI crawlers generated more than 88 billion views on Wikimedia sites in 2025 (Pew Research Center, Wikipedia at 25 2026).
- Wikipedia is the single most-cited domain in ChatGPT answers at about 47.9% of top citations (Profound / 5W Public Relations 2025).
- The English Wikipedia had 250,013 active editors in July 2026; volunteers made 94.1 million edits worldwide during 2025 (Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Statistics 2026; Wikimedia Foundation, Year in Review 2025).
- Wikipedia drew about 6.79 billion visits per month in 2025, the world’s fourth most-visited website (Similarweb, wikipedia.org Traffic Analytics 2026).
- Readers spent 5.39 billion hours reading Wikipedia across all languages in 2025 (Wikimedia Foundation, Year in Review 2025).
- The most-read article of 2025, on Charlie Kirk, drew almost 45 million views (Wikimedia Foundation, Top 25 Most-Read Articles 2025).
- Wikimedia Foundation revenue reached $208.6 million in FY2024-2025, with $189.5 million from donations (Wikimedia Foundation, FY2024-2025 Audit Report 2025).
1. Wikipedia’s Scale: Articles, Words, and Edits
English Wikipedia’s growth has changed shape rather than stopped. New-article creation peaked in 2006, but editors keep expanding existing pages: the English edition now holds more than 5 billion words across 7.2 million articles, averaging roughly 717 words each (Wikipedia, Size of Wikipedia 2026). The cumulative edit count, past 1.36 billion, reflects two decades of incremental revision rather than a burst of new entries.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Articles, English Wikipedia (Jul 2026) | 7,209,792 | Wikipedia:Statistics |
| Total pages, English Wikipedia | 65,915,861 | Wikipedia:Statistics |
| Cumulative edits, English Wikipedia | 1.36 billion | Wikipedia:Statistics |
| Total words, English Wikipedia (Mar 2026) | 5 billion+ | Size of Wikipedia |
| Average words per article | ~717 | Size of Wikipedia |
| New articles per day, English | ~500 | Wikipedia:Statistics |
| Registered accounts, English Wikipedia | 53.7 million | Wikipedia:Statistics |
Context: growth in new articles has slowed to about 15,000 per month (most recent stated rate, Wikipedia, Size of Wikipedia 2024), while text volume keeps rising by roughly 1 GB of compressed prose a year.
2. Languages: 347 Live Editions and One Bot-Built Giant
Article counts flatter some editions. English leads on human-written depth, but Cebuano ranks second worldwide with about 6.12 million articles that were mostly machine-generated by an automated program, not written by a community (Wikipedia, List of Wikipedias 2026). Strip out bot-inflated editions and the genuine human leaders after English are German, French, and Swedish.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia language editions (active / total) | 347 / 363 | List of Wikipedias |
| Articles, all languages combined | 67.9 million | Wikipedia:Statistics |
| Cebuano articles | 6,115,360 | List of Wikipedias |
| German articles | 3,136,557 | List of Wikipedias |
| French articles | 2,769,726 | List of Wikipedias |
| Swedish articles | 2,626,591 | List of Wikipedias |
| Spanish articles | 2,125,800 | List of Wikipedias |
| Russian articles | 2,109,926 | Statista, Wikipedia articles by language |
Outlier: Cebuano and Swedish both sit high on the list largely because a single bot mass-created stub articles, a reminder that raw article counts overstate editorial coverage.
3. The Volunteer Editor Community
Wikipedia runs on a small, shrinking core of volunteers. The English edition counted 250,013 active editors in July 2026 (registered, non-bot accounts making five or more edits that month), and just 814 administrators oversee the largest reference site on the internet (Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Statistics 2026). The unpaid, self-governing model parallels the dynamics in our open-source software statistics roundup, where a thin volunteer layer maintains resources the whole web depends on.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Active editors, English Wikipedia (Jul 2026) | 250,013 | Wikipedia:Statistics |
| Active editors worldwide, all projects | ~250,000 | Year in Review 2025 |
| Active registered users, all projects | 600,000+ | Pew Research, Wikipedia at 25 |
| Share of active users on English Wikipedia | 45% | Pew Research, Wikipedia at 25 |
| Global edits during 2025 | 94,135,666 | Year in Review 2025 |
| Edits per minute, globally | 324 | Year in Review 2025 |
| Administrators, English Wikipedia | 814 | Wikipedia:Statistics |
| Women among contributors (2020, most recent) | ~15% | Wikimedia Community Insights |
Note: the gender figure is flagged as most recent available (Wikimedia, Community Insights 2020); the contributor base has remained roughly 85% male across successive surveys.
4. Readership and Traffic
Even after the 2025 decline, Wikipedia’s reach is enormous. Readers spent about 5.39 billion hours reading Wikipedia across all languages in 2025, including 2.76 billion hours in English alone (Wikimedia Foundation, Year in Review 2025). Similarweb ranks wikipedia.org the fourth most-visited website worldwide, and traffic still spikes to record highs around major news events, as our global internet usage statistics show for reference platforms generally.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly visits (2025) | 6.79 billion | Similarweb, wikipedia.org |
| Monthly unique visitors | 908 million | Similarweb, wikipedia.org |
| Unique devices per month, English (2025) | 965 million | Year in Review 2025 |
| Reading hours, all languages (2025) | 5.39 billion | Year in Review 2025 |
| Reading hours, English (2025) | 2.76 billion | Year in Review 2025 |
| Most-read 2025 article (Charlie Kirk) | ~45 million views | Top 25 Most-Read 2025 |
| Second most-read (Deaths in 2025) | 42.5 million views | Top 25 Most-Read 2025 |
| Peak traffic record (Pope Leo XIV, May 2025) | ~800,000 hits/sec, 6x normal | Top 25 Most-Read 2025 |
Divergence to note: Similarweb’s 908 million monthly unique visitors and the Foundation’s 965 million monthly unique devices for English measure different things (visitors versus devices) and use different methodologies, so treat them as complementary rather than identical.
5. The AI Effect: Falling Human Traffic, Rising Bots
This is the defining Wikipedia story of 2026. Human pageviews fell roughly 8% in 2025 versus 2024 as AI search summaries answer questions without a click-through, while the machines themselves consume ever more of Wikipedia’s infrastructure (Wikimedia Foundation, New User Trends on Wikipedia 2025). The same pattern of AI intermediation appears in our AI search statistics roundup, and the shift of younger audiences to short-form video tracks our Gen Z media statistics.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Human pageview decline vs 2024 (Oct 2025) | ~8% | New User Trends 2025 |
| Non-human agent views (2025) | 88 billion+ | Pew Research, Wikipedia at 25 |
| Bot share of resource-heavy traffic | 65% | How Crawlers Impact Operations 2025 |
| Bot share of total pageviews | ~35% | How Crawlers Impact Operations 2025 |
| Multimedia bandwidth growth since Jan 2024 | +50% | How Crawlers Impact Operations 2025 |
| Wikipedia share of ChatGPT top citations | 47.9% | Profound / 5W Public Relations 2025 |
| Scraper-traffic reduction goal (FY2025-26) | -20% requests, -30% bandwidth | How Crawlers Impact Operations 2025 |
| LLM content guideline (WP:LLM) in force | March 2026 | WikiProject AI Cleanup |
Context: the paradox is stark. AI answers rely on Wikipedia for nearly half their sourcing yet remove the reason to visit, and editors have added defensive measures including a WP:G15 speedy-deletion criterion (August 2025) for unreviewed machine-generated pages (Wikipedia, WikiProject AI Cleanup 2026).
6. Wikimedia Foundation Finances (FY 2024-2025)
The nonprofit behind Wikipedia stayed donation-funded and ran a modest surplus. Total revenue reached $208.6 million in fiscal 2024-2025, 11% above its $188.7 million target, with donations still the overwhelming majority at $189.5 million (Wikimedia Foundation, FY2024-2025 Audit Report 2025). The Foundation is diversifying: banner donations slipped to 30% of revenue while recurring giving and the Wikimedia Enterprise API business grew.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue, FY2024-2025 | $208.6 million | FY2024-2025 Audit Report |
| Total donations | $189.5 million | FY2024-2025 Audit Report |
| Banner donations | $62.4 million (30%) | FY2024-2025 Audit Report |
| Recurring giving share of donations | 21% (+18% YoY) | FY2024-2025 Audit Report |
| Wikimedia Enterprise revenue | $8.3 million (+148%) | Financial Reports |
| Total expenses | $190.9 million (+7%) | FY2024-2025 Audit Report |
| Community grants | $26.3 million | FY2024-2025 Audit Report |
| Endowment support to Foundation | $3.1 million | FY2024-2025 Audit Report |
Note: Wikimedia Enterprise, which sells structured Wikipedia data to large reusers, contributed 4% of total revenue in its second reported year, a sign the Foundation is beginning to monetize the same AI-scale demand that strains its servers.
Summary: Wikipedia by the Numbers
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Articles, English Wikipedia | 7.21 million | Wikipedia:Statistics 2026 |
| Articles, all languages | 67.9 million | Wikipedia:Statistics 2026 |
| Language editions (active / total) | 347 / 363 | List of Wikipedias 2026 |
| Cumulative edits, English Wikipedia | 1.36 billion | Wikipedia:Statistics 2026 |
| Words, English Wikipedia | 5 billion+ | Size of Wikipedia 2026 |
| Active editors, English Wikipedia | 250,013 | Wikipedia:Statistics 2026 |
| Active registered users, all projects | 600,000+ | Pew Research, Wikipedia at 25 2026 |
| Global edits in 2025 | 94.1 million | Year in Review 2025 |
| Monthly visits | 6.79 billion | Similarweb 2026 |
| Reading hours, all languages 2025 | 5.39 billion | Year in Review 2025 |
| Most-read 2025 article (Charlie Kirk) | ~45 million views | Top 25 Most-Read 2025 |
| Human pageview decline (Oct 2025) | ~8% | New User Trends 2025 |
| Non-human agent views (2025) | 88 billion+ | Pew Research, Wikipedia at 25 2026 |
| Bot share of resource-heavy traffic | 65% | How Crawlers Impact 2025 |
| Multimedia bandwidth growth since Jan 2024 | +50% | How Crawlers Impact 2025 |
| Wikipedia share of ChatGPT top citations | 47.9% | Profound / 5W Public Relations 2025 |
| WMF total revenue, FY2024-2025 | $208.6 million | FY2024-2025 Audit Report 2025 |
| Wikimedia Commons files | 144.6 million | Wikidata / Commons 2026 |
| Wikidata items | 122.3 million | Wikidata:Statistics 2026 |
| Women among contributors (2020) | ~15% | Community Insights 2020 |
Methodology and Sources
Data was gathered by prioritizing primary Wikimedia dashboards, the Foundation’s audited financial disclosures, and independent survey or measurement organizations, cross-referencing traffic figures across two or more sources where possible and flagging any statistic older than 2024.
- Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Statistics (2026)
- Wikipedia, Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia (2026)
- Wikipedia, List of Wikipedias (2026)
- Wikipedia, WikiProject AI Cleanup (2026)
- Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia Year in Review (2025)
- Wikimedia Foundation, Top 25 Most-Read Articles of 2025 (2025)
- Wikimedia Foundation, New User Trends on Wikipedia (2025)
- Wikimedia Foundation, How Crawlers Impact Operations (Diff) (2025)
- Wikimedia Foundation, FY2024-2025 Audit Report Highlights (Diff) (2025)
- Wikimedia Foundation, Financial Reports (2025)
- Wikidata, Wikidata:Statistics (2026)
- Pew Research Center, What the data says about Wikipedia on its 25th anniversary (2026)
- Similarweb, wikipedia.org Traffic Analytics (2026)
- Statista, Wikipedia articles by language (2026)
- Profound / 5W Public Relations, ChatGPT citation study (2025)
- Wikimedia, Community Insights / Address the gender gap (2020, most recent available)
Data watch: The Wikimedia Foundation’s Year in Review and Top 25 Most-Read Articles publish annually each December, with the 2026 edition expected December 2026, and its audited financial report typically lands in November covering the July-June fiscal year. Pew Research Center revisits Wikipedia periodically around anniversaries. Live counts on Wikipedia:Statistics, List of Wikipedias, and Wikidata:Statistics update continuously.
Last updated: July 17, 2026. We review and update this page quarterly as new data is published.