Wikipedia, the largest in history encyclopedia, ranks 5th in the world in website visits. More than two decades after its creation, as of 2024, readers can freely browse over 300 languages and a total of more than 60 million articles online. Worldwide page views exceed 25 billion per month.

The name “Wikipedia” comes from combining “wiki,” which means “a system in which an unspecified large number of users collaboratively edit content directly from a web browser,” with “pedia” from “encyclopedia” (Note 1). In other words, Wikipedia is like an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Why has Wikipedia come to be used so widely? What challenges does it face? In two articles, we explore the overall picture of Wikipedia and probe its issues. In this first article, we introduce Wikipedia’s growth and trends in languages and article counts.

Wikipedia logo (Photo: Harleen Quinzellová / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed])

Wikipedia’s growth

Wikipedia branched off from an online encyclopedia called Nupedia, founded in 2000. Nupedia allowed only experts to write and edit, but the pace of article creation was slow and it struggled. A separate project that anyone could write and edit was proposed, and Wikipedia was born. In a short time, many contributors who wrote and edited joined, and the content grew richer. One factor behind the rapid increase is said to be that, rather than relying too much on novel technology, it provided a simple, user-friendly platform, which helped content grow significantly.

The number of people around the world who edit without pay has grown enormously; as of 2023, the number of accounts used for writing and editing exceeded 100 million. By contrast, this includes accounts used only once or no longer in use, and so-called active users—those who made edits in the past month—are only about 280,000.

Its policy of offering all content for free and not carrying advertisements is also thought to have contributed to growth in readership. Because Wikipedia is sustained mainly by volunteer work, it has been a relatively low-cost project to realize, but for costs such as servers and staff to manage the site it solicited donations and grants. To manage the operations and finances of Wikipedia and related projects (Note 2), the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikimedia Foundation) was established in 2003.

There are observations that the Wikimedia Foundation is a wealthy foundation with a financial cushion, able to continue operating for years even with no additional income. In the 2022–2023 fiscal year, it raised about US$170 million in donations, including contributions from other large foundations, major corporations, and billionaires among others. Separate from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia Endowment (Wikimedia Endowment) was also established to ensure the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia and related projects, and it was reported to have saved about US$120 million in 2023.

People editing Wikipedia (Finland) (Photo: Wikimedia Finland / Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed])

Relationship with search engines

Another reason for Wikipedia’s success lies in its relationship with search engines. Even with rich content, Wikipedia wouldn’t be used if potential readers couldn’t find it, making search engines that direct users to the site crucial. As of 2007, about 70% of Wikipedia visits were said to come via search engines. Conversely, search engines need a vast amount of content to provide to users. From the standpoint that Wikipedia provides summarized information on all kinds of topics for free, it became valuable to search engines. There was also the benefit that the information-providing format is standardized and that large amounts of new information were added every year. For these reasons, a symbiotic relationship between Wikipedia and search engines emerged. Google, the world’s largest search engine, recognized Wikipedia’s value and, since 2010, has made large donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

When search engine users search, Wikipedia pages are highly likely to appear in the search results. In a 2021 study of three search engines—Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and DuckDuckGo—Wikipedia pages appeared on the first page of results in 80–84% of searches where general search terms were entered. Why do Wikipedia pages show up so frequently? Reasons cited include the fact that many other websites link to Wikipedia pages, which search engine algorithms value, and the factthat Wikipedia pages are frequently edited and updated, leading algorithms to treat them as fresh information.

But Wikipedia pages do not appear only in the regular lists of search results. Articles from Wikipedia also frequently appear in the information boxes (the Knowledge Panel) shown alongside results. In other words, search engines not only point users to other websites containing the information they want, but also provide systems where users can obtain the desired information directly from the search engine’s own page via information boxes populated with Wikipedia content. This tendency can be seen on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

A Wikipedia information box displayed at the top of DuckDuckGo’s search results (Photo: Virgil Hawkins)

Wikipedia is also used by major tech companies outside of web browser search. Voice assistants that respond to spoken requests for information often use Wikipedia. For example, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, use Wikipedia and the related project Wikidata as information sources.

Furthermore, since 2018, some social networking services (SNS) have also begun to use Wikipedia’s information. For example, on YouTube, run by Google, videos deemed by the company to be of questionable reliability, or those likely to contain misinformation/disinformation, are accompanied by links to relevant Wikipedia articles that direct users to the corresponding Wikipedia page. It has also been reported that, since 2023, search results on TikTok, run by ByteDance, display information from Wikipedia.

The huge volume of information on Wikipedia is gathered and edited by volunteers, yet it is used to enhance the services—and also the profits—of giant tech companies. While these companies have provided donations to Wikipedia, they have basically used Wikipedia’s information for free. As use in information boxes and as supplemental explanations for videos became ongoing, Wikipedia finally began offering paid content. In 2021, Wikipedia established Wikimedia Enterprise, and the following year Google became a customer. This paid content has become a new source of revenue for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia around the world

Wikipedia went live in January 2001 in English, and it became multilingual quickly. Within the first year after its creation, more than 10 new Wikipedias in other languages were launched. It eventually grew to over 300 language editions. However, comparing the total number of Wikipedia articles by language, European languages account for the vast majority. As of 2024, the English Wikipedia has 6.79 million articles, overwhelmingly the most. Languages with the next-largest article counts include Cebuano (6.12 million), German (2.89 million), Arabic (2.84 million), and French (2.59 million).

Cebuano is one of the languages of southern Philippines, and because articles were translated directly from the English Wikipedia by machine translation systems, its article count became this large. The background to the large number of articles in Arabic includes the existence of three Arabic Wikipedias: Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic. Many articles on the Arabic Wikipedia are translated from English.

Thus, while the English Wikipedia accounts for a large share of published articles, its share becomes even larger in terms of pageviews. The English Wikipedia accounts for about half of all Wikipedia views worldwide. In the background is the fact that views from English-speaking countries make up a large portion of Wikipedia’s global pageviews. As of 2024, the five countries with the most views are the United States (about 3.0 billion/month), Japan (about 910 million/month), Germany (about 890 million/month), the United Kingdom (about 880 million/month), and India (about 860 million/month).

However, even in countries where English is not necessarily the most widely used language, views of the English Wikipedia can be high. For example, India’s most-spoken language is Hindi, with 44% of the population using it as a first language. Yet, as of 2017, 92% of Wikipedia articles viewed from India were on the English Wikipedia. The same tendency is seen in Nigeria. Nigeria uses more than 500 languages, with Hausa used as a first language by the largest share of people (31% of the population). But as in India, most of the Wikipedia pages viewed in Nigeria (97%) are the English Wikipedia.

Beyond language preferences, government policies in each country also affect Wikipedia’s pageviews around the world. For example, although Chinese is the most widely spoken first language in the world, the Chinese Wikipedia ranks 8th in pageviews. A major reason is the fact that the Chinese government bans access to Wikipedia on the mainland and blocks the sites of the various Wikipedias. Russia and Myanmar are also said to block domestic access. Saudi Arabia and Iran partially block access as well. In the past, Turkey, Syria, and Pakistan have also blocked access.

Bias seen through article counts

Thus, the Wikimedia projects publish more than 60 million articles online across many languages. However, information on events, places, and people around the world is not necessarily provided in a balanced way. In Wikipedia’s distribution of articles, regional balance and gender balance are viewed as particular problems.

From a regional balance perspective, the number of articles related to the Global North—high-income countries—is overwhelmingly greater than those about the Global South—low-income countries. A study in 2014 found that 84% of geotagged Wikipedia articles across all languages were about Europe and North America. Among all regions, information about sub-Saharan Africa is the scarcest. The same study found there were more articles about Antarctica than about any country in Africa combined. In addition, of the total number of edits across all articles, articles about the five countries of the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and France accounted for 45%. The number of edits to articles related to the Netherlands exceeded the number of edits to articles about all African countries combined put together.

Heat map showing the locations of topics in geotagged Wikipedia articles (2013) (Image: Kolossos / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed])

At the same time, the situation has been improving over the past decade since that study. While articles about Europe were once 20 times those about Africa, by 2022 the gap had narrowed to four times. However, the bias is still large. A 2022 study found that 62% of biographical articles in more than 25 languages were about people from the five countries of the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and France. Among all Wikipedia articles, featured articles—which may be displayed on the top page as highly rated content—are selected. A 2022 study of the English Wikipedia found that less than 10% of geographically specific featured articles concerned the Global South.

Gender-related bias on Wikipedia is also significant. For example, as of 2023 there were about two million biographical articles on Wikipedia, but those about women accounted for only one-fifth of them. There are also studies suggesting that among articles already published on people, those about women are more likely to be deleted for “insufficient notability.” Gender bias is also seen within article content. For example, in articles about people on Wikipedia, sections on women’s careers include more discussion of private life—such as “marriage”—than is the case for men, according to a study.

A workshop where people collectively edit Wikipedia on the theme of art and feminism (Photo: MU Hybrid Art House / Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed])

What lies behind the bias

The causes of the imbalance seen in Wikipedia’s information do not lie solely with Wikipedia as an organization. Historically, European countries and others colonized and brought much of the world under their control, even transforming the languages used in each region. They also extracted resources from colonies, concentrating wealth in today’s Global North. In part because of this, there is already a large imbalance in the quantity of historical records that become source material for Wikipedia. Historical gender imbalance is similar: the subjects of historical records covered in countries around the world have centered on men.

However, historical bias is carried forward for various reasons even today. The majority of those who write and edit Wikipedia live in the Global North. In the background are factors such as the so-called digital divide in internet access compared with the Global South, and a relatively greater capacity in household budgets to write without pay. When contributors are concentrated in the Global North, the topics selected also concentrate there. For example, there are studies showing that topics chosen by Wikipedia contributors often relate to their cultural identities. This tendency is particularly noticeable in the Japanese and English Wikipedias. In terms of gender, about 85% of those who write and edit Wikipedia are said to be men.

To address such bias, Wikipedia has more than 200 “WikiProjects,” but the road to eliminating it is long. It is important for Wikipedia to be able to gather information from everywhere in the world and to collect information in a balanced way, but it is also important how much of the whole picture of the world can be conveyed to readers—the extent to which Wikipedia can do so. How much can Wikipedia improve from here?

[Click here for Wikipedia and its challenges (Part 2)]

Note 1: “Wiki” originally means “quick” in Hawaiian, and “pedia” originally means “to grow” in ancient Greek, and is used in educational contexts.

Note 2: In addition to Wikipedia, 14 projects are operated, including Wikibooks (Wikibooks), which provides free online books; Wiktionary (Wiktionary), an online dictionary published in 170 languages; and Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons), which provides copyright-free images, video, music, and more.

Writer: Virgil Hawkins

Graphics: Virgil Hawkins

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