Wikimedia in figures/Wikipedia

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

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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).

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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		(Aug 2007)
Articles	10,6 million		(June 2008)
Media files	1.4 million		(Aug 2007)
Views	> 2500 per second		(Aug 2007)
Edits	> 3 per second 347 million total		(Aug 2007)
Editors	> 400,000		(Jul 2007)
Administrators	3,880		(Aug 2007)
Traffic Rank	9 nth		(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

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

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. 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. 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. 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

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

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	Language projects with 100+ articles	Editors	New editors last month	Active editors last month > 5 edits / > 100	Articles	New articles per day	Edits per article (avg)	Edits	Database size	Words
1 Jul 2007	± 9 nth	205	> 400,000	..	..	> 7.5 million	..	..	..	..	..
1 Jan 2007	± 11 nth	179	± 350,000	..	..	..	..	..	..	..	..
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

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	1 June 2007	1 June 2007	1 June 2007	30 June 2007	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

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

Most recent statistics

• Daily refreshed statistics

In-Depth Statistics

• Wikipedia statistics pages A large annotated list of relevant statistics pages
• Multilingual statistics Key figures for all language project, milestones.
• Wikipedia_is_more_popular_than...
• Size of Wikipedia (analysis of growth)

Wikistats: lots of tables and charts on all Wikipedia language projects.		Growth of all Wikimedia projects in one concise chart

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Footnotes