If you just need ballpark numbers, the proposed approach might work. If you want to produce something concretely usable, it's going to be much more complex: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Measuring_mission_success
In particular, 100k is a ridiculous number and restricting yourself to Wikipedia means for many languages you'll lose the most important content people are looking for, e.g. on Wiktionary and Wikisource (dictionaries, original literature and official documents in that language).
Abdel Samad, Rawia, 21/01/2015 09:47:
·We are currently using the article count by language based on Wikimedia’s foundation public link: Source: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias. Is this a reliable source for article count – does it include stubs?
0) You'd better use its source, http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/, 1) which is as reliable as Special:Statistics is, i.e. not so much; 2) and uses the official https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Article_count definition, as stats.wikimedia.org (now) does, 3) calling "good" and "stub" what is now called "countable" and "non-countable".
·Is it possible to get historic data for article count. It would be great to monitor the evolution of the metric we have defined over time?
stats.wikimedia.org has such data.
·What are the biggest drivers you’ve seen for step change in the number of articles (e.g., number of active admins, machine translation, etc.)
Bot imports, clearly. The number of articles is an extremely poor metric for measuring "coverage".
·We had to map Wikipedia language codes to ISO 639-3 language codes in Ethnologue (source we are using for primary language data). The 2 language code for a wikipedia language in the “List of Wikipedias” sometimes matches but not always the ISO 639-1 code. Is there an easy way to do the mapping?
We try to document them at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_language_codes
Andrew Gray, 21/01/2015 10:18:
This uses a definition of "article count" which is a little more generous, and counts all pages in the main namespace.
It doesn't. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Search/Analytics/Metrics_definitions
Nemo