Commons:WMF support for Commons/June 2023 metrics

Wikimedia Commons: trends and metrics

Source for all data in this doc: knowledge gap index and aggregation from PAWS (link points to the Commons data).

The number of articles on Wikipedia is growing over time, but the proportion of illustrated articles remains stable

This plot shows the total number of articles across all Wikipedias. In pink, the proportion of unillustrated articles, in green, the proportion of illustrated articles. Almost half of the articles across all Wikipedias are lacking images. As the total number of articles grows (+10M in the last 2 years), the proportion of illustrated articles stays the same (see plot below), meaning that the effort around adding images to articles is growing proportionally with the number of articles!

The proportion of illustrated articles differs depending on the Wikipedia edition we look at…

One of the major issues of the Commons-Wikipedia ecosystem is that on average, 40% of articles on English Wikipedia remain unillustrated. The plot above shows the distribution of Wikipedia editions, according to percentage of illustrated articles (X axis) and the total number of articles (Y axis). The data is from March 2023. In most large Wikipedias, 50% of the articles does not have an image. However, some large Wikis, such as French and Spanish, are slightly more illustrated, with around 65% of articles with an image. Vietnamese and Dutch on the contrary, are less "visual", with only about 35% of illustrated articles. Smaller Wikis are scattered across the spectrum: for example, in Venetian Wikipedia, almost all articles are illustrated.

The plot above shows the percentage increase of the proportion of illustrated pages for the major wikis, between March 2022 and March 2023. While most Wikis are stable or slightly increase in terms of average proportion of illustrated pages, large Wikis such as russian and polish have decreased their image presence by 16 and 12% respectively

… But illustrated pages get, on average, 2 to 3 times the attention of unillustrated articles

When we add Commons files to Wikipedia articles, their visibility increases massively. This plot shows the average monthly pageviews (excluding bots) across all Wikipedia content articles (namespace 0, data from March 2020-2023). Pageviews are split by articles with images (in green) and without images (in pink). On average, illustrated pages receive between 2 and 3 times the number of pageviews compared to articles without images. This is consistent throughout the year. Note that this is not a causal effect: increased pageviews are not a consequence of the presence of images in the articles. But this is a signal of the large number of consumers of Wikimedia Commons files that make it into Wikipedia.