The best road to progress is freedom's road. - JFK
Texas
The awful truth about Wikimedia's article counts: The article counts of many Wikimedia wikis suddenly changed on 29 March 2015: as the Signpost reported at the time, sixty-five wikis fell below milestones tracked at the Wikimedia News Meta page, and three increased to new milestones.
Discuss this story
Inconsistent information
In the second sentence, I read "a decrease of 281,624 articles in the English Wikisource (a 27% drop)", then later in the page, I read "in the English Wikisource, which increased by 281,199 (a 27% drop)". Signpost 2015-04-06 says "a decrease of 281,624 articles in the English Wikisource (a 27% drop)". What's the right figures ? Cantons-de-l'Est (talk) 23:46, 21 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Database hicups
You missed db hickups as a possible reason for article count mismatch. Updating the article count is not done in the same transaction as making the edit, so every now and then, something weird will probably happen and an article will not get counted. Over time, this probably makes a difference. Bawolff (talk) 03:40, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Stateless, historically and globally consistent measurements
People interested in the issue of how to measure Wikimedia projects growth consistently may want to take a look at our work on metrics standardization and some of the principles we proposed to identify robust metrics. As to the issue of quality vs quantity, check out EpochFail's work on m:Research:Measuring_value-added and m:Research:WikiCredit --DarTar (talk) 19:46, 22 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Disambiguation pages
What it is not taken into account to exclude from the article count, like the redirects, are the thousands of disambiguation pages that by definition they are also not articles. Since they are already treated differently by MediaWiki, it would be easy to do. --geraki TL 07:47, 23 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Other projects
Any reasons why Commons and Wikispecies aren't recounted? I would imagine that Commons is tricky because it's more about files and media than pages. But Wikispecies seems straightforward. I do seem a potential recounting issue in Wikispecies. A lot of taxon authority pages only contain their nationality, area of classification (e.g. botany) and their birth date and death date (or year). These authority pages will have mainspace articles pointing into them but if they don't have a comma, category, image, or interwiki link, these authority pages will be excluded from the count. OhanaUnitedTalk page 00:32, 26 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]