The Wikipedia Chaos Index starts 2025 at 70

The Wikipedia Chaos Index starts 2025 at 70, unchanged from December. Not everything is the same, however: the biggest notable trend from the end of 2024 is the normal holiday lull, which led to longer wait times for pages in the Articles for Creation review queue. AfC submissions and declines remain at the same high levels they were through most of Q4, leading to a lower success rate for potential new Wikipedia pages.

With a continued focus on improving existing page content, Wikipedia has kicked off 2025 with a number of interesting trends. The most prominent of these comes around citations, including an ongoing project to clean up the backlog of 90,000 articles without references, and a wide variety of community discussions about reassessing the quality, and verifiability, of a number of prominent websites and news organizations.

While some of these discussions (like the much-publicized debate about the Anti-Defamation League) have drawn more attention than others, they all point towards a single goal: reducing the amount of low-quality citations on pages across Wikipedia, and any content associated with it.

Pages with a lot of unverifiable information, or facts attributed to low-quality articles, are facing higher levels of punitive activity than ever before – a good reminder that in 2025, a strong defensive strategy, including regular reviews of page contents and activity, is just as important, if not more, to a successful Wikipedia page as a good offensive plan.

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.