How accurate is Wikipedia?
Everyone answers this with an opinion. Here is a number instead.
reading the live count…
Wikipedia's accuracy is not a fixed property you can look up — it is the result of a continuous argument, and that argument leaves a trace. Every time an editor undoes someone else's work, the software records it. So instead of asking whether Wikipedia is reliable, this page counts how often it corrects itself: what share of the English Wikipedia's edits exist purely to undo an earlier edit, who is doing the writing, and how much of it comes from people with no account at all. The figures above are counted from Wikimedia EventStreams, the public feed carrying every change saved on Wikipedia, and they reset at midnight UTC.
Want scale rather than reliability? See how many articles Wikipedia has, how often it is updated, yesterday counted in full, which countries it wrote about today, or whether Wikipedia is down right now.
Yesterday, counted end to end
Today's figures above are still running. These are from the last day the counter saw from its first minute to its last — a partial day would be a wrong number with a date attached.
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Who actually writes Wikipedia
Every edit saved today, in any language edition, by the kind of account behind it.
| Editor | edits today | |
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"Not signed in" covers both plain IP addresses and the temporary accounts Wikipedia now issues to logged-out editors. These are the edits people have in mind when they say anyone can change anything — and they are also the most closely watched, which is why they are worth counting rather than imagining.
What a revert is, and why it is the honest measure
A revert is an edit whose only purpose is to undo an earlier edit. Editors rarely type these by hand: they press a button in one of the standard tools — undo, rollback, Twinkle, Huggle — and each tool writes its own recognisable summary, like Undid revision 1377036483 by …. Counting those summaries as they stream past gives something no opinion piece can: a daily figure for how much of Wikipedia's work is correction rather than addition.
It is a better measure than a spot-check of articles because it is unfiltered. Nobody chose which pages to examine, there is no sample and no scoring rubric — every saved edit on the English Wikipedia passes through the same count, all day, including the ones nobody was watching.
How this is measured, and what it misses
One open connection to the public EventStreams feed, counting events as they arrive. Days are UTC calendar days. An edit counts as a revert when its summary begins the way the revert tools begin theirs.
Only the English Wikipedia is measured for reverts, because every one of those summary patterns is English. Applying them to the German or Japanese editions would quietly report almost no reverts there, which would be worse than reporting nothing. The people-versus-bots split below has no such limit and covers every language edition.
The revert count is a floor, not an estimate. An editor who undoes something and types their own summary from scratch is invisible to this count. There is no correction factor applied to make up for it: a measured minimum is worth more than a guess dressed up as a total.
The same numbers are machine-readable at facts.json, one quotable sentence each, under CC0.
The questions people actually ask
Is Wikipedia a reliable source?
For getting oriented on a subject and for finding the real sources, yes. For citing directly in academic work, no — and Wikipedia says so itself. The distinction that matters is that a printed encyclopedia's errors sit there for a decade, while Wikipedia's have a timestamp, an author, and a public record of being fixed. The rate at which that fixing happens is the number at the top of this page.
Can anyone edit Wikipedia?
Yes. Most articles can be edited without an account, and a minority are protected because they attract persistent trouble. The share of a day's edits that comes from editors who are not signed in is in the table above — it is usually a modest slice, and it is the slice that gets checked hardest.
Is Wikipedia written by bots?
Partly, and more than most people expect. Bots repair links, tidy formatting and import structured data, and on several smaller language editions they create the majority of new articles. The split for today, across every edition, is counted above.
How fast does Wikipedia fix vandalism?
Typically in minutes and often in seconds, because reverting is one keystroke and watchlists are widely used. This page does not time individual reverts; it counts how many were performed, which is the part that can be measured continuously rather than anecdotally.
Why is Wikipedia not allowed as a source at school?
Because it is a tertiary source — a summary of other sources — and because it can change between the moment you read it and the moment someone checks. The practical answer is to use it the way researchers do: read the article, then follow its citations and cite those.