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Statistical information on the size and usage of the Wikipedia. For current site statistics, see: Special:Statistics

Table of contents

1 Statistics on the number of edits per day

2 Median article size

3 Mean article size

4 Article size distribution

5 See also

Statistics on the number of edits per day

5 January 2003

Wikipedia continues to grow rapidly, with the number of edits to Wikipedia pages consistently over 2000 a day in January 2003, up from fewer than 1000 a day the year before.

The following graph shows how the number of edits per day has moved over the period.

There were some marked dips in the number of edits, which occurred in May and July 2002. These were caused by performance problems with the Wikipedia software. Since the introduction of the new Phase III software and a new server on 21st July 2002, these bottlenecks have been eliminated allowing more edits to be made. The spikes in the graph reflect large numbers of articles added automatically by "Bots".

Median article size

These figures give the median size of articles in Wikipedia, in number of characters. The definition of an article is the same as that used in Size of Wikipedia - i.e. in the article namespace, not a redirect and containing at least one comma.

 25th January 2002  1035
 25th August 2002   997

This graph suggests that the explosion of new articles in early September created new small articles faster than articles were being expanded and upgraded. The calculation must be slightly different than that which produced the above numbers for median, because in the dataset of the graph, the median on August 25 was 988 bytes. Nevertheless, all the data points on the graph were calculated the same way, so the trend is legitimate.

Mean article size

As of September 6, 2002, the average article size on the English wikipedia (by the above definition; article namespace, not a redirect, contains a comma) is 1997 bytes, with a standard deviation of 4066.

(This raw byte count includes markup; I don't think mysql has a word count function. Maybe we could count the number of spaces...?)

Comparison figures:

The advertisements for Encyclopædia Britannicas 2002 edition proudly proclaim they have over 85,000 articles. A claimed word count of 55 million words, at an assumed average 5 letters per word and a space, gives an estimated character count of 330 million characters, or a crudely estimated mean article length of 3882 characters, or 647 words.
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, is cited as having 51,000 articles and having 6.5 million words. Assuming an average word length of five characters, and allowing for one space character per word, this gives a mean article length of very roughly 765 characters per article (or 127.5 words) for the Columbia Encyclopedia.

Article size distribution

As of October 27, 2002 (excluding redirects and non-article namespace):

English Wikipedia:
(Note the big shift in 2000+ articles due to mass import of 30,000+ US cities)

    Up to:           In range:
       =0:     5
      <16:     5  |      1-15:     0  0.0% ·
      <31:     5  |     16-30:     0  0.0% ·
      <63:    98  |     31-62:    93  0.1% ·
     <125:  1775  |    63-124:  1677  1.8% *
     <250:  6207  |   125-249:  4432  4.9% **
     <500: 18537  |   250-499: 12330 13.5% *******
    <1000: 32649  |   500-999: 14112 15.5% ********
    <2000: 44601  | 1000-1999: 11952 13.1% *******
    <4000: 85849  | 2000-3999: 41248 45.2% ***********************
    total: 91250  | 4000+    :  5401  5.9% ***

German Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/):

    Up to:           In range:
       =0:     3
      <16:     3  |      1-15:     0  0.0% ·
      <31:     8  |     16-30:     5  0.1% ·
      <63:   164  |     31-62:   156  1.9% *
     <125:   695  |    63-124:   531  6.6% ***
     <250:  2205  |   125-249:  1510 18.8% *********
     <500:  3792  |   250-499:  1587 19.8% **********
    <1000:  5809  |   500-999:  2017 25.1% *************
    <2000:  7067  | 1000-1999:  1258 15.7% ********
    <4000:  7717  | 2000-3999:   650  8.1% ****
    total:  8033  | 4000+    :   316  3.9% **

Dutch Wikipedia (http://nl.wikipedia.org/):

    Up to:           In range:
       =0:     2
      <16:     4  |      1-15:     2  0.1% ·
      <31:     8  |     16-30:     4  0.1% ·
      <63:    40  |     31-62:    32  1.1% *
     <125:   151  |    63-124:   111  3.7% **
     <250:   598  |   125-249:   447 14.8% *******
     <500:  1564  |   250-499:   966 31.9% ****************
    <1000:  2126  |   500-999:   562 18.5% *********
    <2000:  2541  | 1000-1999:   415 13.7% *******
    <4000:  2843  | 2000-3999:   302 10.0% *****
    total:  3030  | 4000+    :   187  6.2% ***

Danish Wikipedia (http://da.wikipedia.org/):

    Up to:           In range:
       =0:     0
      <16:     5  |      1-15:     5  1.1% *
      <31:    17  |     16-30:    12  2.7% *
      <63:    53  |     31-62:    36  8.1% ****
     <125:   190  |    63-124:   137 30.9% ***************
     <250:   268  |   125-249:    78 17.6% *********
     <500:   345  |   250-499:    77 17.4% *********
    <1000:   396  |   500-999:    51 11.5% ******
    <2000:   416  | 1000-1999:    20  4.5% **
    <4000:   438  | 2000-3999:    22  5.0% ***
    total:   443  | 4000+    :     5  1.1% *