Have you ever Wikipedia-ed Wikipedia? Probably not! Well, I was jobless enough to actually do so, so I decided to write an article just to tell us how great Wikipedia really is…but in numbers.
We all use Wikipedia a lot! Be it finding out simple information for school coursework or maybe to check out where to go on holiday, Wikipedia has served us very loyally throughout these days. So just to let you know how awesome Wikipedia really is, here is an article about Wikipedia that you probably didn’t know much about (as of 23 August 2009). Please note that these statistics mostly relate to the English Wikipedia and not counting the Wikipedia of other languages. Also, please note that Wikipedia is so massive that some of these statistics could be changing in the time that you are reading them.
- Launched: 15/1/2001
- Alexa rank: 7
- Number of articles in English Wikipedia: 3,008,892
- Number of words in English Wikipedia: Over 1 billion (25 times that of Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- Number of articles in the whole of Wikipedia with all languages: 9.25 million
- Number of words in the whole of Wikipedia with all languages: 1.74 billion
- Number of pages: 17,774,285
- Number of edits: 328,184,892
- Average number of edits per page: 18.46
- Number of uploaded files: 856,423
- Number of registered users: 10,361,027
- Number of active users (action in past 30 days): 146,307
- Number of administrators: 1,677
- Number of visitors as of 2009 per month: 65 million
- Number of bots (users): 577
- Number of languages: 263
- Number of ‘featured articles’ as designated by the Wikipedia community: Over 2000
- Length of job queue (where short tasks are held in one place to be executed): 4,063
Now if you find you are getting bogged down by all of those numbers, you are! I got bogged down and I decided it was time I stopped. I guess now you’ve got to admit that Wikipedia is one of the internet superpowers even if you didn’t agree so before. Even though these are pretty simple statistics, if you are really interested, check out Wikipedia’s ‘About’ section and then you can Wikipedia ‘Wikipedia’ in the search tool. If you really do have a lot of free time to spare, you will find yourself going through multiple links and you will find that you are absolutely swallowed by statistics by the end of it. I got pretty eaten up by just finding out these. If you do endeavour to find the rest of the (ahem, billion) statistics, go for it! Because, hear it from me now, Wikipedia is BIG!
August 24th, 2009 at 3:53 am
A very educational and highly informative article. I liked it so much. learned a lot today..Thanks for sharing this wonderful stuff.
August 24th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Amusing stuff! I must admit that I don’t use it a great deal as some content can be way off!