Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia

This Wikipedia:Statistics page measures the size of the English-language edition of Wikipedia; mostly page and article count. There are currently 6,913,312 articles in the English Wikipedia.

This page is now partly replaced by the new Wikipedia statistics summary, which is auto-generated from the database dumps, and gives a much wider range of statistics across all the multilingual Wikipedias, although it is badly out of date as regards the English and French Wikipedias. This page is still intermittently maintained for historical continuity, and as an alternative source as a sanity-check on the Wikistats data analysis.

Most of the earlier entries were extracted from Wikipedia: Announcements. Later entries are taken from observations of the new software's built-in article count features.

Wikipedia growth

Graphs of the article count for the English Wikipedia, from January 10, 2001, to September 9, 2007, based on statistics from this page and Wikipedia:Announcements. The two graphs show both logarithmic and linear y-axes. The graphs also show the approximate rate of article increase per day, along with the projected number of articles based on annual doubling referenced to January 1, 2003.

The growth in articles had been approximately 100% per year from 2003 through most of 2006, but has tailed off since roughly September 2006. The trend is no longer one of exponential growth, but has been closer to linear since that time.

Notes

A few notes on features of the graph:

The start of the project showed a slow rise, which slowly increased in speed with time. Hence, the amount of articles in Wikipedia is exponentially rising (the former graph has a logarithmic scale).
The big slowdown in the rate of article creation in June–July 2002 was caused by major server performance problems, remedied by extensive work on the software.
The sudden jump in article count in October 2002 is due to roughly 30,000 stub articles on U.S. towns and cities generated from a database being added by an auto-posting robot, Rambot, during an eight-day period. Although initially controversial as to whether these were "real" encyclopedia articles or merely "stubs", most of the Rambot articles have since been substantially expanded.
Not counting the Rambot operation, the true maximum rate of article creation was in August 2006, when about 2400 net new articles were being added each day. From September 2006 through May 2007, the article count has increased by an average of about 1670 articles per day.
During the first half of May 2007, the article growth rate dropped below 1500 articles per day, the lowest rate since October 2005. The growth rate has since rebounded to about 2000 articles per day from late July through early September 2007.

Annual growth rate

For the English Wikipedia.

Date	Article Count	Increase during Preceding Year	% Increase during Preceding Year	Average Increase per Day during Preceding Year
2002-01-01	19,700	19,700	∞	54
2003-01-01	96,500	76,800	390%	210
2004-01-01	188,800	92,300	96%	253
2005-01-01	438,500	249,700	132%	682
2006-01-01	895,000	456,500	104%	1251
2007-01-01	1,560,000	665,000	74%	1822
2008-01-01	2,153,000	593,000	38%	1625
2008-08-01	2,484,826	570,000	26%	1558

See Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth for more detailed projections.

Comparisons with other Wikipedias

Codes: en - English • de - German • fr - French • pl - Polish • ja - Japanese • it - Italian • nl - Dutch • pt - Portuguese • es - Spanish • sv - Swedish

This graph is based on data from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm as of June 2, 2007, with recent values for the English Wikipedia taken from the data below. The sum includes all 240+ Wikipedia languages. See the front page at http://www.wikipedia.org for a recent article count for the 10 largest Wikipedias.

The English edition remains the largest Wikipedia, over three times as large as the second largest edition, the German Wikipedia. Many other editions shared the quasi-exponential growth of the English edition, though lagging one to three years behind. As these other Wikipedias have grown, the overall percentage of articles in English has been steadily decreasing, and it fell below 25% in March 2007. The percentage of articles in the ten largest Wikipedias has also been decreasing, although these top ten still account for about 67% of all Wikipedia articles as of June 2007.

Chronology of software versions

Phase I UseMod Wiki-based software: January 10, 2001 – January 25, 2002
Phase II PHP-based software: January 25, 2002 – July 20, 2002
Phase III PHP-based software: July 20, 2002 – present

This data set notes the fact that these figures are drawn from multiple data sources and different estimates (see the key below for details), and presents them as a spreadsheet-ready table for graphing. The original data sets are archived: see the links below. Note also that the figures are sampled at random times of day.

Hard copy size

The following illustrates how big the English-language Wikipedia would be printed and bound in book form. (Each volume 25cm tall, 5cm thick, and containing 1,600,000 words or 8,000,000 characters.) It uses the live article count.

3537 volumes
18 stacks

The data set

Key to the data below:

approx: this figure is an approximation
lowerbound indicates that there were at least this many pages
mpac3.1: main page article count from the Phase III software since May 25, 2003: article namespace, not redirects, containing at least one internal wiki link
mpacIII: main page article count from the Phase III software up to May 22, 2003: article namespace, comma, not redirect
mpacII: main page article count from the Phase II software
spII: stats page article count from the Phase II software
all: total of all pages of any sort
commapp: pages which include a comma, a crude way of finding "real" articles
conscnt: "conservative count" taken by removing the count of various types of non-article from the comma page count
MF: Malcolm Farmer
LMS: Larry Sanger
WA: Wikipedia:Announcements

Now extended and annotated with (somewhat gnomic) source information. Note that sampling times are only recorded to the day given by the user recording the entry, and that there is no clear time-zone information for that day.

Note: The current mpac3.1 article count for the English-language Wikipedia is 6,913,312 articles

2008-11-04, 2612599,     mpac3.1
2008-10-20, 2591574,     mpac3.1
2008-10-02, 2569004,     mpac3.1
2008-09-14, 2553609,     mpac3.1
2008-08-16, 2510197,     mpac3.1
2008-08-11, 2500000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2008-07-30, 2479280,     mpac3.1
2008-07-15, 2456599,     mpac3.1
2008-07-02, 2436830,     mpac3.1
2008-06-21, 2421535,     mpac3.1
2008-06-04, 2399617,     mpac3.1
2008-05-20, 2379635,     mpac3.1
2008-05-13, 2370238,     mpac3.1
2008-04-30, 2353068,     mpac3.1
2008-04-06, 2320245,     mpac3.1
2008-03-21, 2291433,     mpac3.1
2008-03-08, 2269796,     mpac3.1 
2008-02-23, 2246333,     mpac3.1
2008-02-07, 2214256,     mpac3.1
2008-01-30, 2200000,     mpac3.1
2008-01-12, 2170716,     mpac3.1
2007-12-16, 2129551,     mpac3.1
2007-12-08, 2118053,     mpac3.1
2007-11-27, 2104052,     mpac3.1
2007-11-15, 2090929,     mpac3.1
2007-10-20, 2055408,     mpac3.1
2007-10-06, 2037246,     mpac3.1
2007-09-09, 2000000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2007-09-05, 1991220,     mpac3.1
2007-08-28, 1978895,     mpac3.1 
2007-08-09, 1941186,     mpac3.1 
2007-08-01, 1925624,     mpac3.1
2007-07-22, 1900000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2007-07-12, 1879826,     mpac3.1
2007-06-23, 1847297,     mpac3.1
2007-06-10, 1828002,     mpac3.1
2007-06-02, 1813007,     mpac3.1
2007-05-25, 1800000,     mpac3.1
2007-05-16, 1785384,     mpac3.1
2007-05-01, 1763270,     mpac3.1
2007-04-16, 1740243,     mpac3.1
2007-03-22, 1700000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2007-03-07, 1674588,     mpac3.1
2007-02-14, 1638583,     mpac3.1
2007-02-08, 1626802,     mpac3.1
2007-01-24, 1598645,     mpac3.1
2006-12-19, 1539908,     mpac3.1
2006-11-24, 1500000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2006-11-08, 1473418,     mpac3.1
2006-10-21, 1444717,     mpac3.1
2006-10-05, 1418517,     mpac3.1
2006-09-22, 1396727,     mpac3.1
2006-08-26, 1344771,     mpac3.1
2006-08-15, 1317963,     mpac3.1
2006-08-06, 1300000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2006-07-04, 1234741,     mpac3.1
2006-06-19, 1200000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2006-06-05, 1173156,     mpac3.1 
2006-05-12, 1129680,     mpac3.1
2006-04-27, 1100000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2006-03-24, 1040919,     mpac3.1
2006-03-17, 1027914,     mpac3.1
2006-03-01, 1000000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2006-02-27,  995933,     mpac3.1
2006-02-14,  971518,     mpac3.1
2006-01-30,  945642,     mpac3.1
2006-01-16,  921824,     mpac3.1
2006-01-03,  897700,     mpac3.1
2005-12-20,  874359,     mpac3.1 
2005-12-05,  851295,     mpac3.1
2005-11-11,  815460,     mpac3.1
2005-10-27,  791967,     mpac3.1
2005-09-12,  726894,     mpac3.1 (another long gap since last manual update)
2005-08-25,  700000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2005-06-19,  600000,     mpac3.1 (inserted retroactively from data in WA)
2005-04-29,  544514,     mpac3.1 (more than one month without data...)
2005-03-18,  500296,     mpac3.1 (after another more minor server glitch and recovery)
2005-03-13,  496881,     mpac3.1
2005-03-01,  486042,     mpac3.1 (after server crash and DB recovery)
2005-02-10,  471659,     mpac3.1
2005-01-27,  458779,     mpac3.1
2005-01-01,  438533,     mpac3.1
2004-12-04,  414023,     mpac3.1
2004-11-18,  398159,     mpac3.1
2004-11-16,  396408,     mpac3.1
2004-11-08,  389614,     mpac3.1
2004-11-01,  384336,     mpac3.1
2004-09-01,  337911,     mpac3.1
2004-08-25,  333015,     mpac3.1
2004-08-23,  331191,     mpac3.1 
2004-08-13,  324551,     mpac3.1 
2004-08-07,  320532,     mpac3.1
2004-07-25,  312524,     mpac3.1
2004-07-10,  302333,     mpac3.1
2004-05-13,  264854,     mpac3.1
2004-05-07,  261964,     mpac3.1
2004-04-28,  255596,     mpac3.1
2004-02-27,  215140,     mpac3.1
2004-02-15,  206665,     mpac3.1
2004-02-07,  202410,     mpac3.1
2004-02-01,  199738,     mpac3.1
2004-01-28,  198011,     mpac3.1
2004-01-22,  196070,     mpac3.1
2003-12-31,  188538,     mpac3.1
2003-12-23,  186539,     mpac3.1
2003-12-16,  184273,     mpac3.1
2003-12-08,  180008,     mpac3.1
2003-12-03,  178093,     mpac3.1, after database rebuild and recalculation of count
2003-11-25,  176091,     mpac3.1
2003-11-21,  174904,     mpac3.1
2003-11-19,  174376,     mpac3.1
2003-11-12,  172387,     mpac3.1
2003-10-30,  168762,     mpac3.1
2003-10-14,  164565,     mpac3.1
2003-10-04,  162636,     mpac3.1
2003-09-27,  160361,     mpac3.1
2003-09-12,  156047,     mpac3.1
2003-09-09,  155316,     mpac3.1
2003-09-04,  154061,     mpac3.1
2003-08-31,  153047,     mpac3.1
2003-08-15,  148859,     mpac3.1
2003-07-27,  144467,     mpac3.1
2003-07-15,  141607,     mpac3.1
2003-07-07,  139896,     mpac3.1
2003-07-04,  139031,     mpac3.1
2003-07-01,  136737,     mpac3.1
2003-06-27,  135963,     mpac3.1
2003-06-25,  135504,     mpac3.1
2003-06-22,  134869,     mpac3.1
2003-06-19,  134256,     mpac3.1
2003-06-16,  133411,     mpac3.1
2003-06-11,  132267,     mpac3.1
2003-06-09,  131900,     mpac3.1
2003-06-06,  131249,     mpac3.1
2003-06-04,  130797,     mpac3.1
2003-05-31,  129884,     mpac3.1
2003-05-28,  129240,     mpac3.1
2003-05-25,  128475,     mpac3.1  (correction of broken counter, new algorithm)
2003-05-22,  120704,     mpacIII  (installation of new webserver on 05-14 fixed the count at 120704)
2003-05-12,  120173,     mpacIII
2003-04-29,  117658,     mpacIII
2003-04-23,  116408,     mpacIII
2003-04-22,  116259,     mpacIII
2003-04-21,  116066,     mpacIII
2003-04-20,  115879,     mpacIII
2003-04-18,  115361,     mpacIII
2003-04-15,  114861,     mpacIII
2003-04-12,  114469,     mpacIII
2003-04-11,  114274,     mpacIII
2003-04-01,  112564,     mpacIII
2003-03-28,  112035,     mpacIII
2003-03-15,  109933,     mpacIII
2003-03-07,  108593,     mpacIII
2003-03-05,  108298,     mpacIII
2003-02-27,  107243,     mpacIII
2003-02-26,  107027,     mpacIII
2003-02-24,  106700,     mpacIII
2003-01-22,  100321,     mpacIII
2003-01-12,   98475,     mpacIII
2003-01-08,   97913,     mpacIII
2003-01-04,   97137,     mpacIII
2003-01-02,   96664,     mpacIII
2002-12-26,   95735,     mpacIII
2002-12-23,   95452,     mpacIII
2002-12-16,   94497,     mpacIII (so; is the counter fixed now?)
2002-12-13,   93834,     mpacIII
2002-12-10,   93301,     mpacIII, Corrected counter drift
2002-12-10,  100046,     mpacIII, RAMBOT causing Error in counter.
2002-12-04,   94165,     mpacIII
2002-12-01,   93880,     mpacIII
2002-11-27,   93263,     mpacIII
2002-11-25,   92777,     mpacIII, ~775 bot generated articles added.
2002-11-22,   91580,     mpacIII, some recent performance problems
2002-11-18,   90905,     mpacIII, article counter is back, after being switched off
2002-11-09,   90266,     mpacIII
2002-11-07,   90003,     mpacIII
2002-11-06,   89375,     mpacIII
2002-11-01,   88597,     mpacIII
2002-10-30,   88292,     mpacIII
2002-10-27,   87285,     mpacIII
2002-10-26,   87206,     mpacIII
2002-10-25,   87037,     mpacIII, rambot in operation
2002-10-24,   80887,     mpacIII, rambot in operation
2002-10-23,   76958,     mpacIII, rambot in operation
2002-10-22,   74005,     mpacIII, rambot in operation
2002-10-21,   66738,     mpacIII, rambot in operation
2002-10-20,   66372,     mpacIII, rambot in operation
2002-10-19,   61128,     mpacIII, rambot in operation
2002-10-17,   54339,     mpacIII
2002-10-14,   53174,     mpacIII
2002-10-11,   52571,     mpacIII
2002-10-10,   52435,     mpacIII
2002-10-08,   52092,     mpacIII
2002-10-04,   50953,     mpacIII
2002-10-03,   50804,     mpacIII
2002-09-30,   49724,     mpacIII
2002-09-27,   47448,     mpacIII
2002-09-26,   47152,     mpacIII
2002-09-25,   46133,     mpacIII
2002-09-24,   45707,     mpacIII
2002-09-23,   45462,     mpacIII
2002-09-22,   45159,     mpacIII
2002-09-21,   44920,     mpacIII
2002-09-17,   43962,     mpacIII
2002-09-16,   43762,     mpacIII
2002-09-10,   42268,     mpacIII
2002-09-09,   42021,     mpacIII
2002-09-07,   41559,     mpacIII
2002-09-05,   41141,     mpacIII
2002-09-04,   40934,     mpacIII
2002-09-03,   40718,     mpacIII
2002-08-31,   40093,     mpacIII
2002-08-22,   38780,     mpacIII
2002-08-14,   37508,     mpacIII
2002-08-12,   37259,     mpacIII, upgraded to phase III software after major performance problems
2002-05-17,   33333,     spII approx (WA)
2002-04-16,   32000,     spII approx (WA)
2002-03-28,   30000,     spII approx (WA)
2002-02-04,   23000,     mpacII approx (WA)
2002-01-09,   20000,     estimate approx (LMS WA)
2001-12-14,   19000,     conscnt approx
2001-12-07,   18000,     conscnt approx
2001-11-06,   16000,     conscnt lowerbound
2001-10-25,   15053,     conscnt (LMS WA)
2001-10-19,   14000,     commacnt lowerbound 
2001-10-04,   13182,     conscnt (MF WA)
2001-09-19,   12502,     conscnt (LMS)
2001-09-09,   11208,     conscnt (MF)
2001-09-07,   10000,     conscnt lowerbound
2001-08-22,    9043,     conscnt
2001-08-07,    8000,     conscnt
2001-07-27,    7243,     conscnt
2001-07-26,    6947,     conscnt
2001-07-08,    6000,     conscnt lowerbound
2001-05-20,    4985,     commapp
2001-05-10,    3969,     commapp
2001-04-27,    3281,     commapp    
2001-03-30,    2221,     commapp
2001-03-24,    1910,     commapp
2001-03-07,    1323,     commapp
2001-02-12,    1000,     all lowerbound
2001-02-08,     900,     all lowerbound
2001-01-31,     617,     all
2001-01-25,     270,     all
2001-01-10,       0,     all

These pages hold the earlier source data in its original ad-hoc tabular format: