How Many People Use Wikipedia in 2023?

“It was a metaphor, for God’s sake—”

“A bloody crap metaphor!”

“How would you know?”

“WIKIPEDIA!” - Elsa points at the phone.

In Fredrick Backman’s “My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry,” 7-year-old Elsa checks Wikipedia every time she hears a new word. The free online encyclopedia is her Millennial way to learn about the surrounding world.

Over the years, Wikipedia has become the main source of information for all generations. One can find millions of articles on various topics. Such glorious times for students!

Curious to know how many people use Wikipedia, which is the biggest Wikipedia page, and more?

Read our list of Wikipedia statistics below to find out.

Stupefying Wikipedia Facts (Editor’s Choice)

• There are 43 million articles in 285 languages on Wikipedia.
• As of January 2020, Wikipedia has more than six million articles in English.
• Wikipedia pages get more than 2,500 views per second.
• The average number of monthly Wikipedia page views is 263 million.
• The Japanese Wikipedia is the second most popular after the English version, but it only gets one sixth of its page views.
• 1.9 edits are made each second on different Wikipedia articles.
• As of October 2021, almost 43 million people globally use Wikipedia.
• Over 46.4 million people access Wikipedia from their mobile devices daily and more than 23.4 million—from desktop.

Wikipedia Statistics To Keep In Mind In 2022

Since Wikipedia’s creation, it has become the world’s largest reference website.

1. Wikipedia wasn’t a separate website at first.

Initially, Wikipedia was a branch of Nupedia—a now-closed English-language free encyclopedia project.

Since articles for Nupedia were written by qualified contributors, the content production process was slow.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, who was employed to work on the project, were looking for another, more efficient way to realize their plan.

Then, they came across the suggestion to use a wiki—collaborative pages that users can edit from a browser.

2. Wikipedia has been around since 2001.

Nupedia’s editors resisted the idea of such an open format. As such, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger called the new project Wikipedia,  found a decent domain host, and launched it on January 15, 2001.

At the end of that year, there were 19 language versions of Wikipedia, including Esperanto, Afrikaans, and Serbo-Croatian.

3. On average, 590 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day.

This adds up to an average of 17 700 new articles added to Wikipedia each month.

4. Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages.

English is the language with the most articles on Wikipedia (6.2 million).

Surprisingly, in December 2020, Cebuano came second (5.5 million)—a language spoken in some parts of the Philippines.

The next six languages in the list are Swedish, German, French, Dutch, Russian, and Italian.

5. The number of words on all Wikipedia pages is 3.528 billion.

Even the most passionate readers couldn’t go through so many words in their life. This is the overall number from 6.4 million articles.

6. As of January 2022, 118,900 editors have been active in the past 30 days.

Stats reveal that Wikipedia has more than 42 million registered usernames.

That said, only around 1% of them actively edited articles from December 2021 to January 2022.

7. Prince Philip’s Wikipedia page had the most views in a day in 2021.

Prince Philip died on April 9, 2021. Statistics show that his Wiki page had 3.87 million views that same day.

The Wiki article about Prince Philip remained the page with the highest daily visitor count for 2021.

Wikipedia Traffic Statistics

If somebody asked you how many people use Wikipedia, what would be your guess?

The answer might surprise you.

8. Wikipedia ranks 14th on Alexa’s list of global internet traffic and engagement.

Wikipedia traffic stats reveal that the online encyclopedia holds 14th place in traffic and engagement globally.

The leading 13 website in Alexa’s list are:

• Google.com;
• YouTube.com;
• Baidu.com;
• Tmall.com;
• Qq.com;
• Taobao.com;
• Facebook.com;
• Sohu.com;
• 360.cn;
• Amazon.com;
• Yahoo.com;
• Jd.com;
• Weibo.com.9.

9. The total number of Wikipedia page views in 2021 was 265 billion.

Between January 2021 and December 2021, Wikipedia pages accumulated 265 billion views globally.

The highest count for 2021 was in January, the second—in March, and the third—in May. Each one of these months had over 23 billion page views.

10. Wikipedia gained eight million new users in 2020 and 2021.

Wikipedia statistics reveal that January 2020 had the largest number of new registrations—over 405,000.

However, it has been decreasing ever since. In December 2021, for example, it was just over 254,000.

11. The most page views in December 2021 were from US accounts.

Three billion Wiki page views came from US residents in December 2021. The next country on the list is Japan, with one billion.

Germany and the UK were third and fourth, with 945 million and 864 million views on Wikipedia, respectively.

12. Wikipedia is accessed from over 67 million devices per day.

That’s nearly the population of Thailand!

Of them, over 22 million people use Wikipedia every day on desktop and over 45 million—on mobile.

How Large Is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia. This was verified by Guinness World Records on January 18, 2021.

13. There are 55,632,716 Wikipedia articles.

The number of Wikipedia articles brought the website the title “Largest encyclopedia online.”

It received it on January 18, 2021—just three days after its 20th birthday.

14. As of April 2021, Wikipedia has 19.52 GB of data.

Data shows the compressed size of all Wikipedia articles is around 19.52 GB.

Since users add over 17,000 new articles a month, this number is even bigger now.

15. The English version of Wikipedia was printed in 2015.

Michael Mandiberg, an American artist and programmer, created a print version of the English part of the website in 2015.

He put together 7,473 volumes with 700 pages each. 

16. The largest Wikipedia version is the one in English.

The English version hit six million articles in January 2020. This made it an unprecedented leader on the list.

17. The longest Wikipedia article is about Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign endorsements.

Created in September 2020, the biggest Wikipedia page is 648,769 bytes long.

Before Joe Biden took the lead, the timeline of historical geopolitical changes was at the top of the list. Now it holds second place.

An article on the coronavirus pandemic is third.

Fun Facts About Wikipedia

Wikipedia is full of facts but we are full of facts about Wikipedia as well.

Ha!

18. The six millionth article on the English Wikipedia was about Maria Elise Turner Lauder.

Maria Elise Turner Lauder was a 19th-century Canadian teacher, linguist, and author. She published books about her travels across Europe.

The article is a work of Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight—a long-time Wikipedia editor.

19. The article about the US is the page with the most views.

Wikipedia statistics from December 1, 2007, to January 1, 2022, show that the article about the US has 237 million views. This makes it the most-viewed page.

The next most-visited Wikipedia pages are:

• Donald Trump;
• Barack Obama and Elizabeth II (with the same number of page views—155 million);
• India;
• World War II;
• Michael Jackson and the United Kingdom, with 133 million views each;
• Cristiano Ronaldo;
• Lady Gaga.19.

20. There are some extremely weird Wikipedia articles.

We have all read educational Wikipedia articles on topics we are interested in.

But have you ever stumbled upon a really weird one?

Here is a list of our favorite weird Wikipedia pages you might come across:

• Mary Toft, the woman who claimed she gave birth to rabbits in 1726;
• Ruth Belville, who sold people the time, setting their watches to the Greenwich Observatory clock;
• Elvis Sightings, conspiracies that the King of Rock is still alive and has been seen at a number of places; 
• The man with the longest surname—998 letters;
• Shizo Kanakuri, or the man who completed one marathon in 54 years.

Pretty extravagant, right?

21. There is a Wikipedia Monument.

The monument is located in Slubice, Poland and was designed by an Armenian sculptor. It’s dedicated to all Wikipedia contributors.

22. The first person to have a dedicated Wikipedia page was… Thomas Reid.

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid who lived in the 18th century, was the first man with a dedicated Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia Trends

We explored different Wikipedia statistics about its users, page views, articles, and key events.

Now, it’s time to take a look at the emerging trends.

23. Wikipedia’s most popular article as of January 2022 is about Betty White.

The beloved Old Hollywood star died on December 31, 2021—less than a month before turning 100!

As of the first week of January 2022, her page has 2,084,339 views.

The next nine pages with the most Wikipedia searches and views in this period are:

• Sidney Poitier;
• “Spider-Man: No Way Home” film;
• Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff;
• Don't Look Up (2021 film);
• Antonio Brown;
• Deaths in 2022;
• Elizabeth Holmes;
• “Encanto” (2021 film);
• Pushpa: The Rise (2021 Indian action film).

24. Wikipedia’s “Article of the day” for January 17, 2022, is about the movie Ghostbusters.

The “Article of the day” is a summarized extract of one Wikipedia page. It is placed on top of the main page, which gets more than five million views per day.

You can trace the articles that have been featured in the “Article of the day” back to 2004.

25. Ser Amantio di Nicolao made 4,552,014 edits on Wikipedia articles.

He leads the second editor by more than two million edits. The next four top Wikipedia contributors are BrownHairedGirl, Koavf, BD2412, and Tom.Reding.

Wrap Up

Wikipedia is one of the greatest proofs of the internet’s capability to connect people. Above, we covered how many people use Wikipedia, how much traffic it attracts, and even some fun facts about the website.

Read the full article to learn the story of the online encyclopedia that provides free-access content to millions of people around the world.