Wikipedia has launched a Spotify Wrapped-esque Year in Review that brings your reading history to life as a personalized summary within its mobile app. The feature lets you know how many entries you read, which topics caught your eye and had you swiping, and also the total time reading across the encyclopedia.
What the New Recap Shows About Your Wikipedia Reading
The Year in Review serves up bite-size stats, such as the quantity of articles you opened; your most popular subjects; and the combined minutes you spent reading. Consider it a digestible slice of your curiosity, with categories that organize your activity by theme — history, sports, science, pop culture and more.
There are important caveats. The summary is limited to activity from the Wikipedia app while you’re logged in, so it won’t track reading you did on desktop or when you didn’t sign in. That design decision helps the feature remain narrowly scoped — and by design, less invasive — than engagement roundups on commercial platforms.
Unlike the whimsical personality guesses in some music apps, Wikipedia’s take is pragmatic. It focuses on what you read, not the speculative profile it can build with that information, in keeping with the project’s ethos of minimalism and user privacy.
How to Find Your Year in Review in the Wikipedia App
Open the Wikipedia app on your phone, tap your profile icon and look for the Year in Review card. If you often scroll from a desktop and are signed out, you might see this report come in slimmer. For a deeper 2019 recap, be sure to sign in on mobile when you read.
In fact, since the feature is driven by mobile app activity, it’s also a not-so-subtle push to store Wikipedia in your pocket. For many readers that’s already a reality — mobile phones have become an increasingly large part of Wikipedia’s global readership.
Why This Move Matters for Wikipedia and Its Readers
Year-end recaps are part of tech culture now, from Apple Music Replay to YouTube Music Recap to Strava’s Year in Sport. They encourage sharing, stimulate conversation and, most important of all, they bring dormant users back into apps. Wikipedia making the change is noteworthy because it’s a nonprofit knowledge project, not an ad-based platform.
The Wikimedia Foundation has always prided itself on being scrupulous about gathering as little information from users as possible, and on remaining transparent. A summary within logged-in, app-level activity threads a needle: providing users with a satisfying reflection of their year while not extending surveillance beyond what’s necessary to operate the product.
There’s also an educational upside. A record of what you’ve read — from physics to filmography to football — can help lead to a deeper exploration and more thoughtful consumption. For teachers and lifelong learners, that’s more than a novelty; it’s a nudge to develop better reading habits.
Context from the Wider Wikimedia and Wikipedia Landscape
In addition to personal recaps, Wikipedia annually shares overview data about the sitewide trends of the year, like most-read articles and defining topics of the year. Throughout history, pages associated with major news events, high-profile obituaries, blockbuster films and breakout TV series have dominated those lists, in a demonstration of how people use Wikipedia to understand the moment.
The scale remains vast. Wikipedia is available in over 300 language editions and is supported by a global volunteer community that adds hundreds of edits per minute. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, tens of millions of changes are made by contributors every year and billions of reading hours have been logged across languages — statistics that illuminate the platform’s scale as a sort of public information utility.
It’s that volunteer-driven model that sets this recap apart from others. Where commercial services are all about consumption, Wikipedia is about collective knowledge production and the curiosity that drives it. The Year in Review is a modest, user-friendly look through that larger civic keyhole.
What to Watch Next as the Year in Review Evolves
Look forward to gradual improvements over time: richer topic clustering, improved cross-device signals and optional sharing cards for social platforms. Even small adjustments can significantly boost engagement as long as they get readers to pause and think about what they learned — and what they’d like to learn next.
For now, it is this simple message. If you’re curious about your curiosity, open the app, tap on your profile and let Wikipedia show you the story that what you read told this year.
