State of Wikipedia report for February 2026

In February 2026, the Wikipedia Chaos Index sits at 95 which is considered critical levels of chaos. This means that we recommend extreme caution and waiting until activity drops again for publishing new drafts, controversial information or engaging directly with editors.

Administrative activity, from Articles for Deletion nominations to ArbCom cases and conflict of interest investigations, all saw an increase in the first month of 2026. This can be attributed to a combination of a surge in new page submissions, and a general increase in editorial discussions across the platform, which is typical for January.

There has been an increase in both pages being submitted and pages being declined in the Articles for Creation process, as editors continue to be stringent with accepting new Wikipedia pages.

In addition, Wiki Education – a non-profit organization that works with students and academics to improve public knowledge and improve Wikipedia – has been closely following the intersection of Wikipedia and artificial intelligence, and recently published an article based on their findings, reviewing the text of 178 English Wikipedia articles that had been flagged by a detector tool as being AI-generated. What they found was interesting; though only 7% of those articles contained fake sources – the most obvious byproduct of ‘AI hallucination’ – over 2/3rds of the articles failed verification, meaning the cited sources existed, but did not support the claims they were attached to in the article. Although Wiki Education continues to develop tools and training for editors to use artificial intelligence to help identify gaps in resources and knowledge across the project, their study is a strong reminder that AI remains an incredibly imperfect (and potentially harmful) knowledge tool – and on Wikipedia, remains something the platform prefers to insulate itself from, rather than fully embrace.

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.