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 26 April 2024, there are 6,816,939 articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.5 billion words (giving an average of about 668 words per article). The total number of pages is 60,533,450. Articles make up 11.26 percent of all pages on Wikipedia.^[1] As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media.^[2][3]

Wikipedia continues to grow, and the number of articles on Wikipedia is increasing by about 14,000 a month (as of January 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 throughout since the 2010s. In other words, over time, the average article size is growing faster than the number of articles.

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, grow 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.^[4] Thus, article count alone is a very poor indicator of the scale and scope of all Wikipedia editions.

Before 2012, Wikipedia's growth approximately followed a Gompertz growth model. This model was created in June 2010, and it is determined by the Gompertz function,

${\displaystyle y(t)=ae^{be^{ct}}}$,

with parameters

a = 4378449

b = −15.42677

c = −0.384124

t is the time in years since 2000/1/1 (so 2010/1/1 is t = 10.00)

and where e is the constant 2.71828... (Euler's number).

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

Number of English Wikipedia articles^[5]

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month^[6]

Some characteristics of this model are:

This model is related to the quantity (number of articles). The quality might still increase independently depending on the individual article. The model does not account for article size.

As of February 2024, there are more than 4.5 billion words in all English Wikipedia articles, about 670 words per article, and about 27 billion characters, assuming that each word is six characters long (five letters for each word on average plus a space or punctuation mark). For the most recent word count, please see the Special:Statistics page.

The table below shows only the number of words in all content pages, meaning the 6,816,939 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 in 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.

As of 26 April 2024, there are 60,533,450 pages in the English Wikipedia, of which 6,816,939 (11.26%) 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.

There are various elements of the Wikipedia database to consider when describing its size. The most obvious include the markup text of the articles, templates, media/file descriptions, and primary meta-pages that would be needed to render the text of the latest version of the current encyclopedia proper. The associated talk pages and the other namespaces (User, Wikipedia, Help, etc.) are often considered separately. Each of these has an associated edit history, etc. In addition, there are the images and other multimedia (stored in common across all Wikipedias). It is important to take into account whether the data is compressed and if so what compression scheme is used. Besides the English Wikipedia, there are hundreds of Wikipedias in other languages to consider, as well.

In April 2010, the size of the full English Wikipedia edit history was 5.6 TB uncompressed.^[8]

As of June 2015, the dump of all pages with complete edit history in XML format at enwiki dump progress on 20150602 is about 100 GB compressed using 7-Zip, and 10 TB uncompressed.

As of May 2015, the current version of the English Wikipedia article / template / redirect text was about 51 GB uncompressed in XML format.

The size of the article text in the English Wikipedia, measured in gigabytes (compressed), grew steadily from 1 GB in 2006 to 9 GB in 2013 to 11.5 GB in 2015 as shown in the chart. However, due to an error in compiling the data dump for April 2016, the size of the article text shrunk by approximately 9 percent to 10.8 GB compressed (though the actual size of the article text grew in reality, which can be seen by comparing with the March 2016 and May 2016 data dumps).^[9] Likewise, there is also a similar error when compiling the April 20, 2018 data, showing as 12.85 GB (again, the actual size of the article text grew in reality as can be seen by comparing the previous and following months).^[10]

As of February 2013, the XML file containing current pages only, no user or talk pages, was 42,987,293,445 bytes uncompressed (43 GB). The XML file with current pages, including user and talk pages, was 93,754,003,797 bytes uncompressed (94 GB). The full history dumps, all 174 files of them, took 10,005,676,791,734 bytes (10 TB).^[11]

As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB). ^[12]

Other sources for recent size estimates are:

• m:Data dumps
  • m:Data dump torrents
• m:Mirroring Wikimedia project XML dumps/estimates
• Wikipedia Statistics - Tables - English

Codes: en - English • es - Spanish • de - German • ja - Japanese • ru - Russian • fr - French • it - Italian • pl - Polish • pt - Portuguese • zh - Chinese

This graph is based on data from https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm as of 14 June 2015, with recent values for the English Wikipedia taken from the data below. The sum includes all 270+ Wikipedia languages. See the front page at https://www.wikipedia.org for a recent article count for the ten largest Wikipedias.

The English edition remains the largest Wikipedia, slightly larger than the second-largest edition, the Cebuano Wikipedia. Many other editions shared the quasi-exponential growth of the English edition, though lagging one to three years behind. As these other Wikipedias have grown, the overall percentage of articles in English has been steadily decreasing, and it fell below 25 percent in March 2007. The percentage of articles in the ten largest Wikipedias has also been decreasing, although these top ten still account for about 67 percent of all Wikipedia articles as of June 2007. Note that Lsjbot, a bot run by Sverker Johansson, is responsible for much of the growth of the second- and fifth-largest Wikipedias, the Cebuano and the Swedish Wikipedias, respectively, as well as the rapid growth of the Waray Wikipedia. The charts don't show the Cebuano, Swedish, or the Waray Wikipedias. Those three Wikipedias' article count growth primarily consists of stubs pertaining to living organisms and geographical entities (such as islands, rivers, dams, and mountains).

Currently, the English Wikipedia makes up 10.84 percent of all volumes in all editions of Wikipedia.

The English Wikipedia's database size is just over 10 times greater than the next-largest Wikipedia by article count, the Cebuano Wikipedia. (As of October 2023)

• Phase I UseMod Wiki-based software: January 10, 2001 – January 25, 2002
• Phase II PHP-based software: January 25, 2002 – July 20, 2002
• Phase III PHP-based software: July 20, 2002 – present

This data set notes the fact that these figures are drawn from multiple data sources and different estimates (see the key below for details), and presents them as a spreadsheet-ready table for graphing. The original data sets are archived: see the links below. Note also that the figures are sampled at random times of day.

In early 2015, Michael Mandiberg published the English Wikipedia in 7473 volumes of 700 pages each via Lulu, an online e-books and print self-publishing platform, distributor, and retailer.^[14]

The following graphic illustrates how big the English Wikipedia might be if the articles (without images and other multimedia content) were to be printed and bound in book form with a format similar to Encyclopædia Britannica. Each volume is assumed to be 25 cm (9.8 in) tall, 5 cm (2.0 in) thick, and containing 1,600,000 words or 8,000,000 characters. The size of this illustration is based upon the live article count manually adjusted by the average word count on an irregular basis.