Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-05-22/Community_view
TL;DR
Since 2016–2019, aggregate monthly pageviews of Wikipedia's "Vital Articles" are down −26% across eight major languages I sampled (en, es, fr, de, it, pt, ja, ar). The Vital Articles are an imperfect set, but they cover a much broader set of topics than my last sample set, and are widely replicated across wikis. (All of these wikis have at least 80% of the articles, making it more apples-to-apples.)
The decline isn't even across topics. Mathematics, physical sciences, and technology are down 43% to 85%; biographical articles and geography are down less than 10% in half the languages I looked at. The per-topic ordering (which have declined the most or the least) is nearly identical in every one of the eight languages.
Freshness of article content matters, but not as strongly as topic.
Unless you are David Woodard
Or that kid who thought he knew how to speak Scots.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/scots-wikipedia-language-american-teenager.html
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_scale_language_inaccuracies_on_the_Scots_Wikipedia
To be fair, as far I recall, the kid didn't do it out of malice. Just poor skill, got offered help for that after.