State of Wikipedia report for April 2025

This month’s Chaos Index sits at 77, a 17% increase from March.

This increase comes primarily from a significant increase in conflict of interest-related activity – investigations, COI requests being answered or purged, and a definite increase in removing promotional content from the platform.

Another notable increase in April comes from new pages; after a quiet period in the spring, the number of new pages increased to the previous high levels we observed throughout most of 2024.

As AI continues to proliferate across the internet, conversations about the energy demands of large language models are becoming more prominent. Especially when it comes to scaling the technology. Wikipedia is no exception. Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has seen a 50% spike in network traffic, largely due to web-scraping bots. These bots are driving up bandwidth costs, particularly from high-volume image and video downloads from Wikimedia’s vast media library.

Though Wikipedia remains a foundational, free part of the internet, these increasing costs – and the subsequent costs to the environment – are certainly something to monitor, as it could eventually incur foundational changes to the platform (not to mention the effect AI bots have on other sites in ballooning their costs, which websites like iFixIt have discussed recently). Wikipedia could potentially take action to try and reduce its server loads through other means; shortening pages, removing images – or in their most recently stated goal, reduce the amount of traffic from scrapers by 20%, in order to ease the bandwidth load by more than 30%.

NOTE: The Chaos Index is our proprietary metric for measuring turbulence throughout Wikipedia and tracking the community’s current sentiment towards corporate-related pages. The index measures community actions such as editing frequency, content deletion, message board posts, and many other activities that contribute to unstable corporate page environments.