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 July2006, Wikipedia grew by over thirty million words. In other words, a 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.
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.
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 February 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.
The following statistical resources are currently unavailable or no longer updated, and listed for historical interest.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:
2004 March — A whole list of accessed Wikipedia pages: http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/url_200403.html (as of 23 March2004: 38 MB) is a list of all pages accessed in March 2004 (as of 23 March2004: 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
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.
