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You probably wanted http://stats.wikimedia.org/.

Work in progress notice: (to be extended to all Wikimedia projects, periodical copy to foundation site?)
First attempt at a project fact sheet, static and simple, aimed at the media and the general public (Sue Gardner).

This page reflects figures around the historical time point of 2008. Almost none of the data is valid today (as of 2019).
Wikipedia
Web site http://wikipedia.org
Start date 15 January 2001
Languages 250 [1] (Aug 2007)
Articles 10,6 million [2] [3] (June 2008)
Media files 1.4 million [2] [4] (Aug 2007)
Views > 2500 per second [5] (Aug 2007)
Edits > 3 per second
347 million total		 [2] (Aug 2007)
Editors > 400,000 [6] (Jul 2007)
Administrators 3,880 [2] [7] (Aug 2007)
Traffic Rank 9 nth [8] (Sep 2007)

The focus of this article is on quantitative data about Wikipedia that appeal to a wider audience. For a short-list of advanced analyses and in-depth studies see section References.

Introduction

[edit]

Wikipedia is the oldest and by far the largest project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is also the largest, most extensive and fastest growing encyclopedia currently available on the Internet, despite its relative short existence: the first Wikipedia project was started as recent as 2001. See also History of Wikipedia.

Traffic volume

[edit]

Wikipedia visitors statistics are much less detailed and complete than almost everyone who inquires about Wikipedia's popularity and growth, including many journalists and researchers, would like to see.

The reason Wikimedia has much more extensive statistics about its editors than about its visitors is the sheer volume of data processing that would be required to produce the latter. Server access logs from hundreds of Wikimedia servers, containing many terabytes of data per day, would need to be merged and processed. This would have had serious implications, possibly bringing the internal network to a halt. Moreover it was considered unwise use of scarce hardware resources. For this reason direct visitor statistics have not been collected for several years.

Page view counts

A partial solution was produced 2006/2007 with the WikiCharts project.[9] Here page view statistics were collected without burdening the Wikimedia servers (using a common technique for web access counters: the user PC notifies an external server after the webpage has been received). These statistics were based on random sampling, again needed to cope with enormous numbers involved, and thus only dependable for often visited pages. Newer solutions, based on Squid server logs, are Wikipedia article traffic statistics and THEwikiStics.

Views per second

In June 2007 a one-time measurement was made of number of visitors to all Wikimedia projects combined.[10] The bottom line: all Wikimedia projects combined received roughly 7,000,000,000+ (more than seven billion) visits in that month. This results in an average view rate of more than 2500 Wikimedia pages per second, 24 hours per day. In all likelihood more than 99% of those visits are directed to the Wikipedia project.

Edits per second

Every month approximately 9 to 10 million edits are applied to any Wikipedia project.[11] Put differently, on average the combined Wikipedia databases receive over 3 edits per second, 24 hours per day (see Wikimedia projects edits counter).

Traffic ranks

The most referenced external statistics on the growing popularity of Wikipedia and its sister projects are trend figures and charts produced by Alexa. Although there are reasonable concerns over systemic bias in the results (some groups of users may be under/over represented) the overall trends are very revealing. Also Alexa is one of the few companies that publishes web traffic trends than span over 5 years (2007), and allow easy comparisons between web domains. See also Growth Figures below.

Book volumes

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The English Wikipedia is clearly larger by far than any printed encyclopedia. This gave the inspiration for Wikipedia_is_more_popular_than..., and for the following diagram:

An image hypothesizing the size of a printed version of the English Wikipedia.
Snapshot taken on 5 april 2013. (see also real time updated version)
See also
Wikipedia as books for an impression of how much space would be occupied by a printed edition of the whole of Wikipedia, including all languages.

Growth figures

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In its short history Wikipedia has witnessed a phenomenal growth, in all aspects: number of language projects, size of the projects, number of contributors, visitor counts, and so on.

All Wikimedia projects retain a full history of all article revisions. For each update is recorded who made it, and when, and what had been changed. This makes it possible to collect a wealth of statistical data, and allows plotting of historical trends. As explained above historical visitor statistics are fragmentary at best, traffic ranks are approximations.

  Traffic rank[8][12] Language
projects with
100+ articles[13]		 Editors[7] New editors[7]
last month		 Active editors[7]
last month
> 5 edits / > 100		 Articles[2][13] New articles
per day[14]		 Edits
per article
(avg)[15] 		Edits[16] Database
size[17] 		Words[18]
1 Jul 2007 ± 9 nth 205 > 400,000 .. .. > 7.5 million .. .. .. .. .. [19]
1 Jan 2007 ± 11 nth 179 ± 350,000 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. [19]
1 Jan 2006 ± 20 nth 120 140,905 14,438 40,958 / 6,502 3.1 million 6482 17.6 5.4 million 7.6 Gb 909 million
1 Jan 2005 ± 120 nth 81 47,353 4,416 12,848 / 2,301 1.3 million 2891 13.0 1.7 million 2.7 Gb 327 million
1 Jan 2004 ± 950 nth 39 9,827 1,130 2,893 / 653 400,000 1193 8.4 427,000 715 Mb 94 million
1 Jan 2003 ± 10,000 nth 14 1,955 226 580 / 151 400,000 1193 5.4 123,000 232 Mb 35 million
1 Jan 2002 .. 7 426 87 190 / 27 138,000 351 2.5 16,000 36 Mb 5 million
*15 Jan 2001 1                
* English Wikipedia started
Note: all figures relate to encyclopedic content only (discussion, user and housekeeping pages are excluded)

Largest Wikipedias

[edit]
Rank Language 100+
articles
since 		Articles New
articles
in last
12 months 		Growth
in last
12 months 		Share Active
wikipedians
edits last month
> 5 / > 100 		New
articles
per day 		Edits per
month
1. English Feb 2001 1,811,430 644,718 +55% 24.3% ± 50,000? / ± 5,000? ± 2200? ± 4 million?
2. German Jun 2001 592,031 183,253 +45% 7.9% ± 7,500/± 1100 ± 525 ± 875,000
3. French Feb 2002 501,658 206,697 +70% 6.7% 4251 / 738 597 635,000
4. Polish Nov 2001 384,757 145,739 +61% 5.2% 2144 / 371 413 301,000
5. Japanese Feb 2003 374,721 155,928 +71% 5.0% ± 4500;/± 550 ± 475 ± 500,000
6. Italian Nov 2002 304,080 141,348 +87% 4.1% 2715 / 496 423 365,000
7. Dutch Nov 2001 300,579 99,519 +49% 4.0% 1737 / 309 402 242,000
8. Portuguese Oct 2001 261,568 119,043 +84% 3.5% 1594 / 212 265 224,000
9. Spanish Oct 2001 238,157 114,996 +93% 3.2% 3627 / 489 402 447,000
10. Swedish Aug 2001 231,631 67,308 +41% 3.1% 998 / 165 174 127,000
11. Russian Feb 2003 176,332 92,517 +110% 2.4% 1687 / 334 300 217,000
12. Chinese Dec 2002 127,944 57,812 +82% 1.7% 1713 / 256 172 163,000
13. Finnish Mar 2003 117,088 52,785 +82% 1.6% 910 / 155 157 116,000
14. Norwegian Feb 2002 113,708 50,182 +79% 1.5% 630 / 120 113 86,000
15. Esperanto Jan 2002 84,751 39,842 +89% 1.1% 147 / 43 35 37,000
16. Turkish Jan 2004 80,360 56,944 +243% 1.1% 656 / 88 134 117,000
17. Slovak Jul 2004 70,021 30,391 +77% 0.9% 191 / 49 61 35,000
18. Czech Mar 2003 68,437 36,279 +113% 0.9% 516 / 88 83 58,000
19. Romanian Sep 2003 64,275 30,181 +89% 0.9% 260 / 56 127 74,000
20. Danish Sep 2002 63,325 20,128 +47% 0.8% 379 / 61 59 47,000
Data from n.a. 1 June 2007 [20] 1 June 2007 [20] 1 June 2007 [20] 1 June 2007 [20] 30 June 2007 [21] 30 June 2007 30 June 2007
Some data (with the question marks) for the English Wikipedia are extreme but conservative extrapolations, as statistics after October 2006 are not yet available.
Similar data for the German and Japanese Wikipedias are safe extapolations, based on exact figures from the previous month.
Codes: en - English • de - German • fr - French • pl - Polish • ja - Japanese • it - Italian • nl - Dutch • pt - Portuguese • es - Spanish • sv - Swedish
See for explanation Size_of_Wikipedia

Trivia

[edit]

At a rate of 400 words a minute, 24 hours a day, a person could read nearly 20 million words in a month. In the month of July 2006, the English Wikipedia grew by over 30 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.

References

[edit]
Most recent statistics
In-Depth Statistics

Wikistats: lots of tables and charts on all Wikipedia language projects. Growth of all Wikimedia projects in one concise chart
Footnotes
  1. ↑ "Wikistats". Wikimedia. 
  2. ↑ a b c d e "List of Wikipedias". Wikimedia. 
  3. ↑ "Wikistats by S23 - List of Wikipedias". S23. 
  4. ↑ pictures, audio files, video files
  5. ↑ Figure is explained in the article text.
  6. ↑ "Wikistats, Editors per Month". Wikimedia. Retrieved September 2007. 
    Editors defined as "Registered contributors who edited at least 10 times since they arrived".
    Conservative estimate, as numbers for English Wikipedia needed to be extrapolated.
  7. ↑ a b c d Many regular contributors edit/operate on several Wikipedias (especially administrators), the actual number of unique persons is therefore lower
  8. ↑ a b "Traffic Rank". Alexa. Retrieved 2 September 2007. 
  9. ↑ "WikiCharts, most viewed articles on the English Wikipedia (example)". Wikimedia Toolserver. 
  10. ↑ "Wikimedia page views". Wikimedia lead developer Brion Vibber. 
  11. ↑ "Wikistats, Edits per Month". Wikimedia. 
  12. ↑ "Awareness statistics". Wikimedia. 
  13. ↑ a b "Wikistats, Article count (official)". Wikimedia. 
    Languages with 100 or more articles. At 1 July 2007 there were yet another 45 Wikipedias with less articles.
  14. ↑ "Wikistats, New articles per day". Wikimedia. 
  15. ↑ "Wikistats, Edits per article". Wikimedia. 
  16. ↑ "Wikistats, Edits per month". Wikimedia. 
  17. ↑ "Wikistats, Database size". Wikimedia. 
  18. ↑ "Wikistats, Words". Wikimedia. 
  19. ↑ a b Recent data for the English Wikipedia are not yet available. Until then some figures can not be given, others only estimated (±.. or >..)
  20. ↑ a b c d http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_ranking_June_2007
  21. ↑ TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
Wikimedia projects in figures

Wikibooks(&Wikijunior) · Wikimedia Commons · Wikinews · Wikipedia · Wikiquote · Wikisource · Wikispecies · Wikiversity · Wiktionary . Meta

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