Wikipedia in 2026: Key Statistics

• 7,256,820 articles in English Wikipedia (live API, 2026-10-29) — within 66.5 million total pages including redirects and service pages, two numbers that must not be confused.
• 65+ million articles across 300+ languages per the Wikimedia Foundation's 25th-anniversary figures (2026-01-15); the Foundation's October 2026 self-description raises it to more than 67 million.
• 348 active language editions — 364 Wikipedias officially created, 16 closed (Meta, 2026-10-29).
• Wikidata: ~123.8 million items (live API, 2026-10-29) — the structured-data layer that feeds knowledge panels and AI systems.

Takeaway: "Wikipedia" is 348 separate editorial communities around one brand — which is why notability, sourcing and pricing all run per edition.

• 12.92 billion human page views across all Wikimedia projects in September 2026 — down 7.9% year over year (Wikimedia REST API); English Wikipedia alone took 6.27 billion (−9.3% y/y).
• 1.66 billion unique devices accessed Wikipedia sites in September 2026 (−7.5% y/y); the July 2026 seasonal peak was 2.03 billion.
• The Foundation's own assessment (2025-10-17): human pageviews are down roughly 8% year over year, which it attributes to generative AI and social media answering questions directly, often based on Wikipedia content.
• Independent context: when a Google AI summary appears on a results page, users click a traditional link in 8% of visits versus 15% without one (Pew Research, March 2025 data).

Takeaway: people increasingly read Wikipedia through AI intermediaries — the content's influence persists even as direct visits decline, which changes where accuracy matters.

• Nearly 250,000 editors per month across all languages — the Foundation's definition: at least one edit per month, named accounts only (WMF, 2026-01-15). Wikipedia is edited 324 times per minute.
• 40,940 active editors on English Wikipedia in September 2026 (5+ content edits in the month) — down 14.5% year over year.
• 4,284 very active editors (100+ edits/month) — down just 1.7%: the committed core holds while casual participation thins.
• Different public "editor counts" use incompatible definitions (≥1 edit vs. ≥5 edits vs. any action in 30 days) — compare only like with like.

Takeaway: fewer, more concentrated editors review more content — review queues and scrutiny per article both grow, which raises the bar for anything submitted.

• The Foundation states that almost all large language models train on Wikipedia datasets and calls Wikipedia one of the highest-quality datasets used in LLM training (WMF, 2025-10/2026-01).
• In a 730,000-conversation study of ChatGPT usage (US, Oct–Dec 2025), Wikipedia was the single most-cited domain: 5% of all citations, appearing in 18% of conversations that cite sources.
• Bots now dominate the expensive end of traffic: at least 65% of the costliest traffic comes from bots while bots are ~35% of pageviews (WMF, April 2025); by March–April 2026 the Foundation was blocking or throttling ~30% of crawler requests that ignore its policies.
• Meanwhile the llms.txt standard remains unconsumed in practice — 97% of llms.txt files never receive a single request (137K-site study, May 2026), and Google stated (2026-07-10) its AI features need no special files or markup.

Takeaway: AI assistants read Wikipedia at industrial scale and cite it more than any other domain — being accurately represented there is now machine-distribution infrastructure, not vanity. Context: the industry page and AI visibility.

• The community-maintained list of paid-editing companies recorded, as of 2026-10-05: 197 entries under "Undisclosed paid editing", 11 under "Disclosed paid editing", 2 disclosed-but-blocked, and 19 defunct.
• Review is slow and selective: a Signpost recap (2026-05-22) of an industry audit of 1,009 Articles-for-Creation drafts from late 2025 reported 68% declined, with notability, unreliable sourcing and AI-written text as the top decline reasons, and average review times around 30.5 days for accepted drafts. (The Signpost itself flags the audit as non-peer-reviewed; treat it as directional.)
• The disclosure rules behind those numbers are not new: the Wikimedia Terms of Use have required paid-contribution disclosure since 16 June 2014, with the current ToU in force since 7 June 2023.

Takeaway: the community classifies the overwhelming majority of known paid-editing vendors as operating undisclosed — which is why disclosed status is a trust signal in itself, and why vendor vetting is not optional.

• Grokipedia — the AI-generated encyclopedia launched on 2025-10-27 — stood at version 0.3 as of 2026-10-29, with its article count self-described in 2026 as over 6 million (sitemap evidence closer to 5.9 million). Its editorial model and review practices remain materially different from Wikipedia's volunteer review.
• Wikipedia remains the only nonprofit site in the global top-10 most visited (WMF, 2026-01-15) — the trust position the alternatives are competing against.

Takeaway: alternative wikis can complement a presence strategy, but none currently substitutes for Wikipedia's review-earned authority with either humans or AI systems. More terms: glossary.