Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia
 | This is an information page. It is not a Wikipedia policy or guideline; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
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| English articles | 7,251,011 |
|---|---|
| Total wiki pages | 66,394,784 |
| Article percentage | 10.92% |
| Average revisions | 20.71 |
| Total admins | 808 |
| Total users | 54,910,913 |
| UTC time: 00:02 on 2026-10-11 | |
| WikiStats |
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| Main |
| General statistics |
| Breakdowns |
| Notes |
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The size of the English Wikipedia can be measured in terms of the number of articles, number of words, number of pages, and the size of the database, among other ways. As of 11 October 2026, there are 7,251,011 articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 5.29 billion words (giving a mean of about 730 words per article). The total number of pages is 66,394,784. Articles make up 10.92 percent of all pages on Wikipedia. As of 3 September 2026[update], the size of the current version including all articles compressed is about 26.80 GB without media.[1]
Wikipedia continues to grow, and the number of articles on Wikipedia is increasing by about 15,000 a month (as of July 2024). The number of articles added to Wikipedia every month reached its peak in 2006, at over 50,000 new articles a month, and has been slowly but steadily declining since then. While this might seem to show that Wikipedia's growth is slowing or stopping, it should be noted that the amount of text added to Wikipedia articles every year has been constant since 2006, at roughly 1 gigabyte of (compressed) text added per year. This implies that as time progresses, proportionally more content is added to existing articles rather than new articles, and that Wikipedia has maintained the same persistent rate of growth since the 2010s. In other words, the average article size is growing faster than the number of articles over time.
Most of the earlier entries were extracted from Wikipedia:Milestones. Later entries are taken from observations of the new software's built-in article count features. For information on what Wikipedia's software counts as an article, see Wikipedia:What is an article § Lists of articles and statistics.
The article count of bot-generated Wikipedias such as the Cebuano-language edition of Wikipedia, as well as the Swedish-, Dutch- and the Waray-language editions, grows much faster than those that are primarily written by humans such as the English Wikipedia. Swedish Wikipedian Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot is the primary author of those four primarily bot-generated Wikipedias. Cebuano and Waray are Filipino languages. However, individual articles in bot-generated Wikipedias are on average much shorter than those in primarily human-written Wikipedias.[2] Thus, article count alone is a very poor indicator of the scale and scope of all Wikipedia editions. However, Lsjbot has been dormant since 2020 and users in the Wikipedias primarily authored by Lsjbot are culling low-quality articles amid concerns about AI-generated content on Wikipedia as a whole with the Swedish and Dutch Wikipedias having their bot-generated articles deleted.
Wikipedia growth of article count
[edit]Size and growth rate
[edit]
In this section, the first graph shows the article count from 2002 to 2026; in the second graph, the monthly growth rate has slowed since late 2006 (series trending downward).
Detailed analysis of the data shows that from 2006 to 2009 the article growth rate followed a six-monthly cycle with faster growth in February and August than in May and November. This cycle does not appear in the growth-rate graph here because the values shown in the graph have been averaged over six months.
There is a moderate spike in article creation in 2015.
Note the small drop in article count from late August 2022 to early September 2022.
Annual growth rate for the English Wikipedia
[edit]| Date | Article count | Increase during preceding year | % increase during preceding year | Doubling time (in years and days rounded up) | Average increase per day during preceding year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2002-01-01 | 19,700 | 19,700 | — | — | 54 |
| 2003-01-01 | 96,500 | 76,800 | 389.85% | 160 days | 210 |
| 2004-01-01 | 188,800 | 92,300 | 95.65% | 1 year, 12 days | 253 |
| 2005-01-01 | 438,500 | 249,700 | 132.26% | 301 days | 682 |
| 2006-01-01 | 895,000 | 456,500 | 104.10% | 355 days | 1251 |
| 2007-01-01 | 1,560,000 | 665,000 | 74.30% | 1 year, 91 days | 1822 |
| 2008-01-01 | 2,153,000 | 593,000 | 38.01% | 2 years, 56 days | 1625 |
| 2009-01-01 | 2,679,000 | 526,000 | 24.43% | 3 years, 63 days | 1437 |
| 2010-01-01 | 3,144,000 | 465,000 | 17.36% | 4 years, 121 days | 1274 |
| 2011-01-01 | 3,518,000 | 374,000 | 11.90% | 6 years, 61 days | 1025 |
| 2012-01-01 | 3,835,000 | 317,000 | 9.01% | 8 years, 29 days | 868 |
| 2013-01-01 | 4,133,000 | 298,000 | 7.77% | 9 years, 104 days | 814 |
| 2014-01-01 | 4,413,000 | 280,000 | 6.77% | 10 years, 208 days | 767 |
| 2015-01-01 | 4,682,000 | 269,000 | 6.10% | 11 years, 263 days | 736 |
| 2016-01-01 | 5,045,000 | 363,000 | 7.75% | 9 years, 112 days | 995 |
| 2017-01-01 | 5,321,200 | 276,200 | 5.91% | 12 years, 28 days | 755 |
| 2018-01-01 | 5,541,900 | 220,700 | 4.15% | 17 years, 15 days | 605 |
| 2019-01-01 | 5,773,600 | 231,700 | 4.18% | 16 years, 331 days | 635 |
| 2020-01-01 | 5,989,400 | 215,800 | 3.74% | 18 years, 244 days | 591 |
| 2021-01-01 | 6,219,700 | 230,300 | 3.85% | 18 years, 102 days | 629 |
| 2022-01-01 | 6,431,400 | 211,700 | 3.40% | 20 years, 259 days | 580 |
| 2023-01-01 | 6,595,468 | 164,068 | 2.55% | 27 years, 189 days | 450 |
| 2024-01-01 | 6,764,335 | 168,867 | 2.56% | 27 years, 153 days | 463 |
| 2025-01-01 | 6,933,296 | 168,961 | 2.50% | 28 years, 35 days | 462 |
| 2026-01-01 | 7,114,903 | 181,607 | 2.62% | 26 years, 295 days | 498 |
| 2026-10-11 | 7,251,011 | 136,108[a] | 1.91%[a] | 481[a] | |
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Approximately one article is created every three minutes at this rate.
At this rate, there are approximately 105 days from now until the English Wikipedia reaches 7.3 million articles and 1495 days from now until the English Wikipedia reaches 8 million articles.
Number of words
[edit]As of March 2026, there are more than 5 billion words in all English Wikipedia articles, with an average of about 717 words per article. There are about 30.6 billion characters, assuming that each word is six characters long (five letters for each word on average plus a space or punctuation mark). Please see the Special:Statistics page for the most recent word count.
The table below shows only the number of words in all content pages, meaning the 7,251,011 articles; it does not include words in other namespaces like Talk, User, or Wikipedia. Data for 2002 through 2010 is from the old Wikistats-1 and thus only precise to the month rather than a specific day within a month. Data for 2018 to the present is from the Special:Statistics page, as saved on that date by the Internet Archive. There is no record of the number of words from January 2010 to December 2017; Wikistats-1 no longer includes the number of words after January 2010, and the Special:Statistics page only started showing the number of words in all content pages on 15 December 2017. Some time within that almost eight-year span, the average number of words dropped. Note that the Internet Archive does not always have an archived version of the Special:Statistics page on the first day of each year.
Milestones
[edit]| Milestone | Date | Time to Reach Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 words | 15 January 2001 | N/A | Date of founding per Wikipedia article page |
| 1 billion words | October or November 2007 | Around 6 years, 11 months | Wikistats-1 |
| 2 billion words | Sometime in 2011 | Around 4 years | Extrapolation from yearly statistics table |
| 3 billion words | Sometime in 2017 | Around 6 years | Extrapolation from yearly statistics table |
| 4 billion words | 19 November 2021 | Around 4 years | Special:Statistics page on that date |
| 5 billion words | 25 September 2025 | 3 years, 10 months, 6 days | Special:Statistics page on that date |
Yearly statistics
[edit]| Date | Word count | Increase during preceding year | % increase during preceding year | Average increase per day during preceding year | Average number of words per article |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2002-01 | 4,800,000 | 4,800,000 | — | 13,151 | 267 |
| 2003-01 | 32,100,000 | 27,300,000 | 569% | 74,795 | 309 |
| 2004-01 | 61,400,000 | 29,300,000 | 91% | 80,279 | 315 |
| 2005-01 | 127,000,000 | 65,600,000 | 107% | 179,726 | 288 |
| 2006-01 | 353,000,000 | 226,000,000 | 177% | 619,178 | 403 |
| 2007-01 | 709,000,000 | 356,000,000 | 101% | 967,123 | 473 |
| 2008-01 | 1,082,000,000 | 373,000,000 | 53% | 1,021,918 | 515 |
| 2009-01 | 1,437,000,000 | 355,000,000 | 33% | 972,603 | 553 |
| 2010-01 | 1,798,000,000 | 361,000,000 | 25% | 989,041 | 599 |
| 2011 to 2017 | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2018-01-03 | 3,077,580,920 | 159,947,625A | 8.9%B | 438,213C | 555 |
| 2019-01-17 | 3,302,922,240 | 225,341,320 | 7.3% | 617,373 | 570 |
| 2020-01-01 | 3,497,842,238 | 194,919,998 | 5.9% | 534,027 | 584 |
| 2021-01-01 | 3,755,065,625 | 257,223,387 | 7.3% | 702,796 | 604 |
| 2022-01-01 | 4,029,071,074 | 274,005,449 | 7.3% | 750,700 | 626 |
| 2023-01-01 | 4,267,944,148 | 238,873,074 | 5.7% | 654,447 | 647 |
| 2024-01-01 | 4,516,979,187 | 249,035,039 | 5.8% | 682,288 | 668 |
| 2025-01-01 | 4,784,651,120 | 267,671,933 | 5.6% | 731,344 | 690 |
| 2026-01-01 | 5,076,522,508 | 291,871,388 | 6.1% | 799,648 | 714 |
| 2026-03-01 | 5,125,583,368 | 49,060,860D | — | — | 717 |
- A Average increase per year from 2010 to 2018; total increase of 1,279,581,000 words over the same time period
- B Average percent increase per year from 2010 to 2018; overall increase of 71% over the same time period
- C Average increase per day from 2010 to 2018
- D So far this year
Monthly statistics since January 2019
[edit]The table below includes the total number of words in all articles, the number of words added, and the average number of words per article at the start or near the start of each month since January 2019.
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Number of pages
[edit]As of 11 October 2026, there are 66,394,784 pages in the English Wikipedia, of which 7,251,011 (10.92%) are articles, which are found in the main namespace, or simply mainspace. The rest of the pages belong to one of the other 11 namespaces, listed here in alphabetical order: Category, Draft, File, Help, MediaWiki, Module, Portal, Template, TimedText, User, and Wikipedia. Each page on Wikipedia can have a corresponding talk page as well. The data for this table is from the Special:Statistics page, as saved on that date by the Internet Archive. Note that the Internet Archive does not always have an archived version of the Special:Statistics page on the first day of each year. Over time, the percentage of all pages on Wikipedia that consist of articles drops as more non-article pages are created than articles.
| Date | Number of pages | Increase during preceding year | Number of articles | Articles as percent of all pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2004-06-11 | 647,883 | — | 281,874 | 43.5% |
| 2005-01-01 | 1,197,913 | 550,030 | 438,141 | 36.6% |
| 2006-01-03 | 3,000,244 | 1,802,331 | 898,545 | 29.9% |
| 2006-12-31 | 6,943,133 | 3,942,889 | 1,558,851 | 22.5% |
| 2008-01-17 | 11,539,058 | 4,595,925 | 2,179,452 | 18.9% |
| 2009-01-14 | 15,748,310 | 4,209,252 | 2,698,541 | 17.1% |
| 2010-01-16 | 19,152,235 | 3,403,925 | 3,160,689 | 16.5% |
| 2011-01-17 | 22,911,618 | 3,759,383 | 3,528,731 | 15.4% |
| 2012-01-13 | 25,967,077 | 3,055,459 | 3,845,029 | 14.8% |
| 2013-01-09 | 29,155,808 | 3,188,731 | 4,139,737 | 14.2% |
| 2014-01-07 | 31,923,877 | 2,768,069 | 4,417,695 | 13.8% |
| 2015-01-04 | 34,707,205 | 2,783,328 | 4,686,061 | 13.5% |
| 2016-01-26 | 38,371,459 | 3,664,254 | 5,067,290 | 13.2% |
| 2017-02-05 | 41,359,746 | 2,988,287 | 5,329,307 | 12.9% |
| 2018-01-03 |