Is Wikipedia down?
Checked from a server in Europe, not from your browser — and it watches the edits, not just the pages.
Why this answers differently from the other checkers
Every "is it down" site works the same way: request a page, report whether it came back. That is a real signal, and this page does it too. But it only tells you the web servers are answering, and Wikipedia has a failure mode where they answer perfectly while nothing can be saved — during maintenance or a datacentre switchover the databases go read-only, pages keep loading from cache, and editors get an error the moment they press publish.
This server already holds an open connection to Wikimedia EventStreams, the public feed carrying every change saved across Wikipedia, because it draws them on a globe. So it can watch the other half: are edits still being saved, and how many a minute. When the pages load and the edits stop, that gap is the whole story.
Quiet is not the same as down
Wikipedia's pace follows daylight around the planet. The quietest hour of the UTC day runs at a fraction of the busiest one, and nothing is wrong with either. So the rate above is never compared against a flat average — it is compared against the same hour on previous whole days, using the median so that one unusual day cannot move the bar. A calm night reads as a calm night.
Days the server only saw part of are excluded from that baseline. An hour counted from halfway through would look half as busy as it was and make a healthy Wikipedia look stalled.
When this page says "stalled"
It means no edit at all has reached this server for two minutes, which is far outside anything the feed does normally. Honestly, that has two possible causes: Wikipedia stopped accepting edits, or this server lost its connection to the feed. From here they look identical, so the page says so instead of picking the more dramatic one. Cross-check against Wikimedia's own status page, which reports on the infrastructure rather than on the result.
Questions
Is it down for everyone or just me?
The check runs server-side, in Europe, so your own network, DNS or office captive portal has no effect on it. If this page says Wikipedia is reachable and your browser disagrees, the problem is on your side of the connection.
Why can I read Wikipedia but not edit it?
Almost always a read-only window: planned maintenance, a datacentre switchover, or a database problem. Reading is served from caches and replicas and carries on; writing stops. It usually lasts minutes. The edit rate above is the quickest public way to see it start and end.
Does this cover every language edition?
The edit rate counts article edits across every Wikipedia language edition at once, so a problem affecting only one small edition will not move it. The page check asks for the English Wikipedia's main page.
Is there an API?
Yes — the same answer as JSON at status.json, including the raw rate, the baseline for the hour and how long it has been since the last edit arrived. Free to use, under CC0.
Related: how often Wikipedia is updated, how accurate it is, how many articles it has, and yesterday counted in full.