Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia

A treemap-like breakdown of Wikipedia's topic areas as of February 2016, based on a random sampling of 1,000 articles
An image estimating the size of a printed version of Wikipedia as of March 2020 (from an automatically updated image based on using volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica with a silhouette of an average man for scale)
Wikipedia size and users
Update
English articles6,921,964
Total wiki pages61,997,364
Article percentage11.16%
Average revisions20.28
Total admins846
Total users48,388,681
UTC time: 04:22 on 2024-Dec-10

The size of the English Wikipedia can be measured in terms of the number of articles, number of words, number of pages, and the size of the database, among other ways. As of 10 December 2024, there are 6,921,964 articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.7 billion words (giving an average of about 688 words per article). The total number of pages is 61,997,364. Articles make up 11.16 percent of all pages on Wikipedia. As of 16 October 2024, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 24.05 GB without media.[1][2]

Wikipedia continues to grow, and the number of articles on Wikipedia is increasing by about 14,000 a month (as of January 2024). The number of articles added to Wikipedia every month reached its peak in 2006, at over 50,000 new articles a month, and has been slowly but steadily declining since then. While this might seem to show that Wikipedia's growth is slowing or stopping, it should be noted that the amount of text added to Wikipedia articles every year has been constant since 2006, at roughly 1 gigabyte of (compressed) text added per year. This implies that as time progresses, proportionally more content is added to existing articles rather than new articles, and that Wikipedia has maintained the same persistent rate of growth throughout since the 2010s. In other words, over time, the average article size is growing faster than the number of articles.

Most of the earlier entries were extracted from Wikipedia:Milestones. Later entries are taken from observations of the new software's built-in article count features. For information on what Wikipedia's software counts as an article, see Wikipedia:What is an article#Lists of articles and statistics.

The article count of bot-generated Wikipedias such as the Cebuano-language edition of Wikipedia, as well as the Swedish-, Dutch- and the Waray-language editions, grow much faster than those that are primarily written by humans such as the English Wikipedia. Swedish Wikipedian Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot is the primary author of those four primarily bot-generated Wikipedias. Cebuano and Waray are Filipino languages. However, individual articles in bot-generated Wikipedias are on average much shorter than those in primarily human-written Wikipedias.[3] Thus, article count alone is a very poor indicator of the scale and scope of all Wikipedia editions.

  1. ^ "Index of /enwiki/latest/". Wikimedia Downloads. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 16 October 2024.
  2. ^ Click on the link in reference 2 and search for "pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2" to see the current size of the database (as defined as the current version of all articles compressed). See Wikipedia:Database download#Where do I get it? for more information.
  3. ^ In November 2021, the English Wikipedia had 624 words per article, versus 195 words per article for Cebuano, 193 for Swedish, 169 for Dutch, and 117 for Waray-Waray. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-12-28/By the numbers.

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