At a rate of six hundred words a minute, twenty four hours a day, a person could read nearly twenty seven 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.
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:
Manually created chart of English-language Wikipedia Article Count - Jan 2001-Jan 2008
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. Nearly all stats updated to 29 February 2008 - English-language wikipedia stats are as of 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.
User:Dragons flight/Log analysis - Edit rate, Edits per article, Revert rate, New articles, new users, new administrators, Uploads and admin actions. Updated Oct 2007.
Time between edits - Time between every 10,000,000th edit, starting 26 January 2002, ending 21 September 2008.
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The following statistical resources are currently unavailable or no longer updated, and listed for historical interest.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:
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 (now gone)
2005 July — Alterego's WikiPulse (which has now disappeared) 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 were unique. There was also an rss feed, and instructions on how to read some of the more interesting graphs.