Wikibase ecosystem in Q1 2025, according to wikibase.world

I wrote a post in February 2025 looking at what the Wikibase ecosystem (might) look like, according to the data that had at that point been collected on wikibase.world. Now that data has had some time to evolve and expand, we can take a little look at how it has changed throughout the last 2 months.

In the future, I’ll try to remember to write something up every quarter or so (for now), until someone else feels like taking this over ;)

The latest notebooks for generating this are in git, and the latest XML file dumped from wikibase.world is on archive.org.

Site count and status

We have gone from tracking 777 sites, up to 873, so an increase of nearly 100 in 2 months.

However, we need to look at the tracked status to determine how big the current ecosystem actually might be. So I added a little extra counting to the notebook previously used to count the wikis based on P13 (availability status).

Back in Feb, there were 774 online, and only 3 marked as offline. This was primarily as Addbot was not often marking sites as offline, however I added automatic detection of deleted sites for wikibase.cloud and went through and checked a bunch of sites that the scripts were failing to lookup.

Looking at the April data, we have ~847 online, and ~26 offline, so an increase of around 3%.

Graph

Most of the growth in sites seems to come from wikibase.cloud, however many sites on wikibase.cloud are test sites and may not have much content.

So when displaying the graph this time, I’ll filter out everything that doesn’t have a highest Item ID of at least 25, this roughly cuts the size of the graph in half.

Picking another arbitrary cutoff to show a graph for, ignoring everything that has not at some point reached Q250, we end up with an even lighter graph.

Hosts

Due to me cleaning up some of the offline wikibases from wikibase.world, we end up with some slightly different percentage splits for the different hosts.

• A lower % from wikibase.cloud, which likely sees high turn over of test sites (was 91%, now 72%)
• 10% independently hosted, up from 3%
• 14% unknown, up from 3%

One of the next jobs will be to try to track down more of these unknown hosts, or align them with existing hosts!

And now that we have 2 data points, we can start to visualize some of this information over time…

Versions

wikibase.cloud hosted sites continue to dominate the view of the wikibase versions used.

However, if you click on 1.39.7 in the key, you can hide it!

The number of different versions is again quite long, so we can benefit from only looking at the major and minor parts…

Again you can click on 1.39 in the key to hide the large cloud count.

And as raw data….

Goodbye 1.27! 1.28, you are next (I think that’s 2016)…