Our readers moved to phones. Our editing is at desktops.
Share of 2025 pageviews from mobile. Urdu's low share comes with a suspicious bot activity
Present · Readers
A break in the series
Recorded human pageviews fell after 2023
Bot detection changed in 2025, and March-August data was revised. AI answers, search changes, and detection changes may all contribute.
Human pageviews per year, all Indic Wikipedias, millions (Wikimedia Pageviews API). The 2025 bot-detection update makes earlier and later data imperfectly comparable; the chart does not estimate AI's effect.
Present · Readers
Country traffic
Indic wiki traffic crosses borders
34%
of Nepali Wikipedia July traffic is from Nepal
23% is from the United States
44%
of Sinhala July traffic is from Sri Lanka
19% is from the United States
US
traffic is prominent
but rankings can include automated traffic
July 2026, Pageviews API by country. This endpoint does not separate human and automated traffic. Bangladesh and Pakistan are excluded by privacy policy; home-country shares are more useful than small-country rankings.
Present · Readers
What readers want
We are the identity encyclopedias — July's most-read article, per wiki
"India" is the #1 reading category on almost every wiki. Readers come to us for who we are — and to English for everything else.
Translation
The counter-trend · articles translated
Fewer editors, better tools, more articles — translations per year, +184% since 2020
Articles published with Content Translation per year, all Indic Wikipedias (2026 is pacing lower, ~40k annualized).
Translation
300,000 articles
For some wikis, translation is how the wiki grows — published translations relative to current article count
2,612
people have translated into Bengali
the widest participation funnel of any editing workflow
299k
translations published into Indic wikis
12% of the 2.5M global Content Translation total; about 7% were later deleted
Translation
The missed opportunity
93% of it flows from English. Sibling languages barely translate each other: 2.1%
اردو → سنڌي
Urdu → Sindhi · 1,147 articles
हिन्दी → ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
Hindi → Punjabi · 568 articles
ಕನ್ನಡ → ತುಳು
Kannada → Tulu · 334 articles
It works, but it is just rare. Arabic alone sends more into Urdu (12k) than all Indic languages send each other.
Knowledge gaps
Choose your reference
The "gap to English" is mostly a gap of American actors
Top missing categories against English, weighted by English readership — identical across every wiki in this comparison:
Measuring against English measures your distance from American pop culture.
That is not the gap our communities need to close. Measure against peers instead.
Knowledge gaps
Peer gaps · interactive
Gap postcards between neighbours
is missing, compared with
Category names appear in the reference wiki's language — the neighbour describing what it can offer. Data: topictrends gap discovery, coverage snapshot 2026-06.
Sister projects
The quiet counter-trend
While Wikipedias lose editors, the sister projects hold or grow
~40
active editors on Tamil Wikisource
a larger community than most Indic Wikipedias
7×
Kannada Wiktionary vs Kannada Wikipedia
266k entries against 36k articles
Active editors per year, summed per project family. Wiktionary set an all-time record in 2025; Wikisource has grown every year since 2023.
Sister projects · Wikidata
Lexicographical data
Wikidata lexemes across Indic languages — counts are not coverage
The big number is hollow: 83% of the Malayalam lexemes carry no senses, and 80% are nouns — a bulk word-list import, not lexicography. And Malayalam is morphologically productive: a materialized word list is a debated model for it in the first place. Hindi and Urdu lexemes live under "Hindustani".
Sister projects · Wikidata
The closing challenge
Items tagged with country: India are usually labelled only in English — 912,073 Wikidata items; who can name them?
No individual Indian language labels more than 1 in 12 of these items. This measures direct country (P17) = India statements, not all India-related items. Every infobox, search result, and assistant that reuses Wikidata inherits this gap.