Wikipedia:Statistics
- See also: stats.wikimedia.org, the Wikimedia statistics site.
At a rate of four hundred words a minute, twenty four hours a day, a person could read nearly twenty million words in a month. In the month of July 2006, Wikipedia grew by over thirty million words. In other words, a sleepless fast reader could never catch up with Wikipedia's new content. Reading the current incarnation at that rate would take over two years, and by the time they were done, so much would have changed with the parts they had already read that they would have to start over. As a result, sometimes the only way to get an idea of the bigger picture is with statistics.
The available statistics cover various aspects of Wikipedia, whether as an encyclopedia, a website, or a community. Some provide current snapshots and others track growth and development over time.
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Automatically updated statistics
- Special:Statistics — a page that reports the current number of articles, which can also be seen wherever the MediaWiki feature {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} is used. Also recorded are the total number of pages overall, the number of edits and edits per page, and the number of registered users and administrators, along with links to other statistics pages.
- Automatically updated statistics showing requests and traffic across all Wikimedia clusters:
- WikiCharts — an experimental traffic analysis tool: its results should be treated with caution, and should not be relied upon as correct or representative, still less authoritative. An improved traffic analysis tool is currently in development.
- Wikipedia's reach, traffic and ranking compared to other websites — graphs and comparison statistics provided by Alexa Internet
- Wikipedia compared with other sites — graph using the above to compare Wikipedia against various top 10 sites.
- MediaWiki Projects Statistics — contains primarily the Wikimedia projects automatically daily refreshed graphs based on Special:Statistics RAW output of all sites.
Manually updated statistics
These are compilations of statistical information that are updated regularly from outside sources.
- Awareness statistics — tracking growth in public awareness
- Wikipedia is more popular than... — a list of Alexa traffic comparisons
Periodically updated statistics
A number of statistics have been generated by various people from database downloads, which allow them to analyze the Wikipedia database automatically using various programs and scripts. The frequency of updates varies according to when new downloads are available and how often the maintainers can produce them.
- Wikipedia Statistics Sitemap — Erik Zachte's statistics for all projects and all languages. Partially updated to 30 June 2007 - English-language wikipedia stats are as at 30 October 2006.
- Multilingual statistics — monthly details of total article count, and analysis of the monthly rate of article growth, for each version of Wikipedia.
- List of Wikipedians by number of edits — Updated based on data as of 2 August 2007.
Analysis
- Size of Wikipedia — focuses on number of articles
- Size comparisons — comparison against other encyclopaedias and information collections
- Modelling Wikipedia's growth — analysis of the total number of article, attempting to fit mathematical growth models
- Does Wikipedia traffic obey Zipf's law? — as of September 2006, the answer appears to be "yes, approximately".
- Top 500 websites by number of inbound links from Wikipedia — reveals most linked domains from external Wikipedia links. Updated November 2006
Archived statistics
The following statistical resources are currently unavailable or no longer updated, and listed for historical interest. They are sorted by the month in which they were last updated:
- 2003 March — List of articles frequently visited through Google
- 2004 February — Pages from English Wikipedia with more than 1000 hits
- 2004 February — Pages from English Wikipedia with more than 1000 hits & Wikipedia namespace
- 2004 March — A whole list of accessed Wikipedia pages: http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/url_200403.html (as of 23 March 2004: 38 MB) is a list of all pages accessed in March 2004 (as of 23 March 2004: 684,000), in all namespaces, sorted by number of times that they have been accessed; includes pages that do not exist. URLs are taken until ampersand or question mark, if any, hence w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Allpages&from=Train falls under w/wiki.phtml, but the equivalent wiki/Special:Allpages/Train would be listed separately
- 2004 April — As above, but updated
- 2004 April — Traffic - an old system for measuring traffic
- 2004 August — List of Wikipedians by most recent edit - listed based on number of articles to which they had made the most recent edit
- 2004 February/October — Web browsers used to access Wikipedia
- 2005 July — Alterego's WikiPulse gathered many statistics every hour from various sources. Some of the statistics, such as the mailing list totals, most active wikipedian per hour and per day, and most edited article per hour and per day are unique. There is also an rss feed, and instructions on how to read some of the more interesting graphs.
- 2005 September — List of Wikipedians by number of recent edits
- 2005 October — Wikipedia:Words per article
- 2006 January — Search engine statistics
- 2006 January — Most referenced articles, a list of the articles that are linked to by the greatest number of other articles
- 2006 March — Stub percentages, information on stubs as a percentage of total articles
- 2006 July — WikiProject creation and attrition trends
- 2006 September — Articles which are number 1 for one-word Google searches