A New Personalised Reading Recap
Wikipedia ended 2025 with a surprise update. The platform introduced a new Year in Review feature that mirrors Spotify Wrapped’s familiar style, but for your reading habits. Users opened the mobile app and discovered personalised summaries that showed reading minutes, top topics, and article visits. The idea landed during a year marked by record traffic, heavy cultural moments, and surging interest in prominent public figures.
The recap experience appeared in the Wikipedia mobile app, meaning only logged-in mobile activity counted toward each user’s personal reading summary. Desktop usage sat outside the capture window. Still, readers welcomed the feature. It created a snapshot of how they learned throughout the year.
Wikipedia also released its 2025 editorial version across page views and reading hours. The report showed how global events, political turmoil, public figures, and true-crime media shaped reading patterns on one of the world’s most-visited sites.
What’s Happening & Why This Matters
Wikipedia introduced a Spotify Wrapped-style recap inside its iOS and Android mobile apps. Readers tapped the profile icon to view the Year in Review moment. The summary displayed the total number of visited articles, total reading time, favourite topics, and personal reading streaks.
The feature used only in-app logged-in data, so the picture felt partial for users who read heavily on desktop browsers. Still, readers enjoyed the framing. It created a moment of reflection on their attention habits. Wikipedia said the recap encouraged people to track curiosity trends and understand how they interacted with knowledge.
A Wikimedia spokesperson said the tool came from “ongoing efforts to improve reader engagement through personalised content.”
What the World Read Most in 2025
Wikipedia’s own sitewide recap showed dramatic concentration for political and cultural names. The page for Charlie Kirk, the political activist who died earlier in the year, reached about 45 million views. The entry Deaths in 2025 drew roughly 43 million, showing the cultural pull of annual mortality lists.
Ed Gein reached around 31 million after Netflix released Monster: The Ed Gein Story. Entertainment always finds a way to drive encyclopedic traffic. New films landed in the top ten as well: the vampire drama Sinners and the comic book reboot Superman both broke into the top ten.
The list also included President Donald Trump, Pope Leo XIV, and Elon Musk, who launched his Wikipedia rival Grokipedia earlier in the year.
Wikipedia said the data illustrated how people chase context around real-time events. When headlines move, the encyclopedia becomes the second stop for background, explanation, and sourcing.
Record Activity on the Platform
Wikipedia reported astonishing activity levels for 2025:
- About 1 billion unique devices accessed English Wikipedia each month.
- Readers logged an estimated 2.4 billion hours on English pages.
- Across all 300+ language editions, users reached 4.6 billion reading hours.
Volunteer editors remained the backbone of the ecosystem. Roughly 250,000 active editors made 67 million edits across all languages. English pages accounted for around 30 million edits. French, German, Spanish, and Russian followed as the next most edited language groups.
Wikipedia said the volume affirmed that “collaborative knowledge creation remains strong despite the rise of AI-generated summaries.”
TF Summary: What’s Next
Wikipedia’s new recap experiment signals a turn toward personalised knowledge analytics. Readers want reflection tools. Wikipedia is in the zone with a design that feels familiar and simple. The update suggests the platform intends to build deeper user-centric features while maintaining its open-knowledge ethos.
MY FORECAST: Year-end recaps are added to leading platforms. Wikipedia’s version develops into a richer reading-intelligence layer that tracks streaks, topic arcs, and discovery patterns. Expect a desktop rollout, cross-device analytics, and expanded personalisation that feels more like a digital learning map than a simple recap.
— Text-to-Speech (TTS) provided by gspeech