Research:2025 The Wikipedia Library survey
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
This work is tracked in Phabricator: T402650
The Wikipedia Library has been running for over a decade, with thousands of users and now over 1 million citations added to Wikimedia projects. Although we hear a lot about the library informally, we've never run a big survey to comprehensively review what users like and don't like about the tool and its content.
Through this survey we hope to learn:
- Who uses The Wikipedia Library?
- What are users' perceptions of The Wikipedia Library?
- How do editors use the library?
- Why do some eligible editors not use The Wikipedia Library?
- What content is missing from the library?
- Is The Wikipedia Library tool useful and accessible?
The results of this survey will help us prioritise new projects and partnerships for the library.
Method
[edit]We plan to distribute a survey to all users who have ever logged in to The Wikipedia Library, except any users who didn't meet the edit count or tenure requirements to use it when they did so. This means we aim to survey any user who could have used the library when they last logged in. This will include users who both did and didn't actually access any content through it.
The survey was distributed to users in December 2025 and January 2026.
Privacy statement: Legal:The Wikipedia Library User Survey Privacy Statement
Results
[edit]
The survey was distributed to ~36,000 users who had both logged in to The Wikipedia Library at some time in the past, and met the eligibility criteria at the time. We received a total of 4,938 full or partial responses.
A full slide deck of graphs is available here. We have summarised the key results below:
Awareness
- 20% of users who responded to the survey were not aware of The Wikipedia Library program, despite having logged in to the website at some point in the past.
- Of users who were aware of the library, a further 20% had not used it to access any publisher content.
- Of users who had not accessed content, most reported either forgetting about the library or how to access it, or not knowing how to use it.
We would like to explore adding clearer pathways to access and use The Wikipedia Library, and providing clearer onboarding when users arrive.
- Respondents were most likely (41%) to have learned about The Wikipedia Library through the Echo notification which is sent when an editor becomes eligible.
- A majority (72%) of respondents do not stay up to date with news or updates about The Wikipedia Library.
There are clear opportunities to advertise our newsletter, Diff blog posts, and project pages, to Wikipedia Library users.
Research & usage
- Among respondents, The Wikipedia Library is a frequently-used research tool.
- Users navigate to the library in a variety of ways, including browser bookmarks, web searches, direct navigation, local project pages, and via the Echo notification.
- Respondents use The Wikipedia Library for a variety of reasons. 41% of respondents use the library for personal reasons in addition to their editing activities on Wikimedia projects.
- Users rarely encounter technical issues or unexpected paywalls.
- Content coverage is good on the whole, with notable gaps in non-English content and about the Asia region.
We will continue to pursue new partnerships, with a focus on non-English content and sources from Asia.
Partnerships
- One-third of respondents believe that the Wikimedia Foundation pays for its subscriptions to publisher content.
- Only 16% of respondents reported understanding how partnerships with publishers are formed.
- 75% of users were not aware (or not sure) that they could request new library partnerships.
- We received a wide range of specific partnership requests from respondents.
We would like to find ways to better communicate the complexities and uncertainties of forming partnerships for The Wikipedia Library, and better educate users on the partnership model. This may help set expectations about the unpredictable timelines.