The Signpost on: “The Awful Truth About Wikimedia’s Article Counts”

From The Signpost:

On 29 March 2015, the articles were recounted on all of the languages of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiversity, and Wikivoyage. Wikibooks was left out because, as previously mentioned, the English and Portuguese Wikibooks use the “comma” criterion to determine articles, and the maintenance script does not correctly implement that counting method. As the Signpost reported last month, 3 wikis rose to higher milestones and 65 wikis fell to lower milestones. The previous report summarizes the major changes seen in those 68 wikis, but more details are available. In addition, among all 679 recounted wikis the most extreme changes were seen in the English Wikisource, which decreased by 281,199 (a 27% drop), and the English Wikipedia, which increased by 97,285 (a 2% rise). The largest relative increase was seen in the Norwegian (Nynorsk) Wikiquote, which rose by 40% (479 pages). One Wikipedia and 14 Wikiquotes lost all of their articles, all of which had 7 or fewer before the change. The mean absolute change was 1340 articles (up or down); the median absolute change was 39 articles. The total article count for all recounted wikis decreased by 551,440, a 0.9% decrease. A full accounting of the observed changes (including changes to total pages and page edits, for comparison) is available.

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