Wikipedia information page
While you read this page, Wikipedia develops at a rate of over 2 edits every second, performed by editors from all over the world. Currently, the English Wikipedia includes 6,899,417 articles and it averages 531 new articles per day. In 2023, 812,635 registered editors made at least one edit. This amount of data can be analyzed in many ways. The best way to get an idea of the bigger picture is with statistics.
This page shows some figures about Wikipedia, analysis of different patterns, and compiles related tools, covering various aspects of Wikipedia, whether as an encyclopedia, a website, or a community. Some provide current snapshots and others track growth and development over time. It also includes frameworks and datasets that can help you in creating your own statistics.
Below are links to some of the most prominent pages that serve as hubs for multiple databases and reports that provide continuous updated data regarding recent activity and development at Wikipedia. Other links further down this page pertain to specific quantitative indicators.
- Special:Statistics – automatically generated statistics about the English Wikipedia
- Wikimedia Statistics – statistics for all Wikimedia projects, including English Wikipedia (English Wikipedia statistics dashboard)
- Wiki comparison - annually updated spreadsheet providing key statistics for all Wikimedia projects, including English Wikipedia
- Database reports – index of automatically generated reports about English Wikipedia (GitHub)
Charts
Statistical breakdowns using lists, tables and rankings.
Size
Number of English Wikipedia articles[1]
Edits per editor
Edits per article
Overall edit volume
- New articles created per day – can be filtered by user group or namespace
- Time between edits – length of time (measured in days) between each block of 10,000,000 edits made to Wikipedia since January 16, 2001.
Articles by quality
As of 2022, the median article is a stub. This typically means that it contains a few sentences on the subject. (Elements such as images, infoboxes, and most lists are not usually counted in this calculation.)
As a rule of thumb, the more popular the article is as measured by page views, the higher quality it will be.
Images
As of 2022, about 50% of articles on the English Wikipedia contain at least one image.
Links
Page views
The English Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects can get ~10 billion views per month each. See overview at Wikimedia Statistics.
Most articles have very low traffic. In 2023, 90% of articles averaged between zero and ten page views per day. The median article gets about one page view per week. Because the top 0.1% of high-traffic articles can each get millions of page views in a year, the mean is about 100 times the median.
Tools to check traffic statistics
Overall traffic
- https://stats.wikimedia.org/ - Wikimedia Stats (for viewing per-project statistics)
- toolforge:siteviews – Siteviews Analysis (for viewing the total number of pageviews to a project, or the number of unique devices)
- Article traffic jumps – a place to document unusual jumps in article traffic.
Articles with the most page views overall
This includes rankings overall, by time period and sudden traffic spikes.
Articles with the most page views by topic
- Category:Lists of popular pages by WikiProject – these projects use pageview data to focus article improvement efforts on popular but poor quality articles
- Pageviews Analysis – article traffic statistics, also allowing comparisons between articles (documentation, local documenation, FAQ, wikitech:Analytics/AQS/Pageviews API documentation)
Traffic stats on specific articles
- toolforge:langviews – Langviews Analysis (for viewing a page's statistics across all languages)
- TreeViews – monthly view statistics for category trees
- Massviews Analysis - accepts lists of articles or category names
Inactive
- User:HostBot/Social media traffic report - retired May 2020
- Wikitop – top 30 most popular articles by categories, with user comments on traffic jumps
- User:West.andrew.g/Popular pages – weekly 5,000 most popular articles based on raw data - inactive since February 7, 2020.
- Wikitrends – top 10 today/this week/this month, and trends (also links for other-language Wikipedia) - not updated since October, 2017
- Summaries for each language Wikipedia for: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015
- Some Alexa statistics – for the English Wikipedia - discontinued in May 2022
- Wikipedia is more popular than... – a list of Alexa traffic comparisons (last updated February 2018)
- Top 50 pages for August 2006 - May 2007, https://chrisharrison.net/projects/wikitop/Top50Final2high.png
- The 50 most-viewed Wikipedia articles in 2009 and 2008 (The Daily Telegraph)
- ZeitGeist (stats.wikimedia.org) - retired at the end of 2018
- Wikipedia:Most popular pages October 2001
- Wikipedia:Popular pages (historical)
- 2003: Oct.
- 2004: Mar. through Sep.
- 2008: May.
- Most read articles in 2008
- Most read articles in 2009
- Most read articles in 2010
- {{stats.grok.se}} — http://stats.grok.se/ - Data collection stopped on 21 January 2016. Was used for viewing older per-page statistics, but offline since March, 2017.
Deletion and vandalism statistics
- This page shows the number of mainspace articles deleted each day.
- Statistics about Articles for Deletion discussions can be found at User:JPxG/Oracle.
- Statistics about deletion and other administrator actions can be found at the WP:Adminstats page.
- A list of recently deleted files can be found at Special:Log/delete.
- An outdated list of revision deletion statistics can be found here.
- A (currently broken) page that showed reverts over recent days using counter-vandalism tools (ClueBot NG, Huggle, STiki) and by other means.
- As of 2023, about 162,000 unique registered editors and 85,000 unique IP addresses have ever edited an AFD page (usually to comment). This represents 1 out of every 85 successful registered editors.
Analytics
The analytics.wikimedia.org site provides
- User Agent Breakdowns grouping results by operating system and browser
- vital-signs total views for different Wikipedia sites
Visualizations
The following tools include artistic, graphs, maps and other visualization projects.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikimedia page view statistics.
Frameworks
- mediawiki-utilities – A set of utilities for accessing and processing MediaWiki data, including XML dumps
Datasets
There are some available datasets that you can download and process:
Templates
Archived statistics
The following statistical resources are currently unavailable or no longer updated, and listed for historical interest. They are sorted by the month in which they were last updated:
- 2013 September – List of Wikipedians by number of recent edits – covers 2004–2013.
- 2010 May – Awareness statistics – tracking growth in public awareness
- 2010 January – comScore audience measurement data – analysis of data donated by one of the third-party measurement services
- 2009 September – THEwikiStics: Page Hits top 1000+ long-term (compare traffic | searches) | Logged search terms | popular last hour | Most missed articles
- 2009 June – Wikipedia:Vandalism statistics
- 2009 April – User:Bryan/List of users by pages created
- 2008 October – Multilingual statistics – monthly details of total article count, and analysis of the monthly rate of article growth, for each version of Wikipedia.
- 2008 May – Most frequently edited pages – Updated based on data as of 23 May 2008.
- 2007 June – Wikimedia page views (Referrers) "not very scientific, but some might find it interesting"
- 2006 September – Articles which are number 1 for one-word Google searches
- 2006 July – WikiProject creation and attrition trends
- 2006 March – Stub percentages, information on stubs as a percentage of total articles
- 2006 January – Most referenced articles, a list of the articles that are linked to by the greatest number of other articles
- 2006 January – Search engine statistics
- 2005 October – Wikipedia:Words per article
- 2005 July – Alterego's WikiPulse (which has now disappeared) gathered many statistics every hour from various sources. Some of the statistics, such as the mailing list totals, most active Wikipedian per hour and per day, and most edited article per hour and per day were unique. There was also an rss feed[dead link], and instructions on how to read some of the more interesting graphs.
- 2004 February/October – Web browsers used to access Wikipedia
- 2004 August – List of Wikipedians by most recent edit – listed based on number of articles to which they had made the most recent edit
- 2004 April – As below, but updated (now gone)[dead link]
- 2004 April – Traffic – an old system for measuring traffic
- 2004 March – A whole list of accessed Wikipedia pages: (as of 23 March 2004: 38 MB) is a list of all pages accessed in March 2004 (as of 23 March 2004: 684,000), in all namespaces, sorted by number of times that they have been accessed; includes pages that do not exist[dead link]. URLs are taken until ampersand or question mark, if any, hence w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Allpages&from=Train falls under w/wiki.phtml, but the equivalent wiki/Special:Allpages/Train would be listed separately (now gone)
- 2004 February – Pages from English Wikipedia with more than 1000 hits and Wikipedia namespace
- 2004 February – Pages from English Wikipedia with more than 1000 hits
- 2003 March – List of articles frequently visited through Google
Archived analysis
- Does Wikipedia traffic obey Zipf's law? – as of September 2006, the answer appears to be "yes, approximately".
- Top 500 websites by number of inbound links from Wikipedia – reveals most linked domains from external Wikipedia links. Updated November 2006.
- User:Dragons flight/Log analysis – Edit rate, Edits per article, Revert rate, New articles, new users, new administrators, Uploads and admin actions. Updated Oct 2007.
- Editing frequency – Statistics on users' editing activity, monthly from January 2001 through September 2008.
- Wikipedia Workload Analysis for Decentralized Hosting – July 2009 analysis of a sample of Wikipedia's traffic over a 107-day period.
See also
Notes
- ^ Registered users who have performed an action in the last 30 days; the number of unregistered active users is not compiled
References
- ^ "Wikistats - Statistics For Wikimedia Projects". stats.wikimedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 11 February 2022.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to English Wikipedia statistics.
- A list of Wikipedia articles created last month/week/day with most users contributing to article within the same period.
- Erik Zachte's site
- List of tools in WikiPapers, with some statistical tools for wikis and Wikipedia
- Wikimedia Foundation analytics team pages on MediaWiki.org, with e.g. definitions of some common metrics
- Wikipedia Page History Statistics
- Wikishark Wikipedia Includes pageviews for all articles in all languages on Wikipedia
- Wikistats: Wikimedia Statistics
