Another data source is https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table (transcluded in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias ), which is updated twice daily by a bot that directly retrieves the numbers as reported in each wiki's [[Special:Statistics]] page, and can be considered reliable. (I.e. it is using basically the same primary source as http://wikistats.wmflabs.org/display.php?t=wp , the tool Ahmed mentioned.)

Two more comments inline below.

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 2:12 PM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Forwarding this question to the public Analytics list, where it's good to have these kinds of discussions.  If you're interested in this data and how it changes over time, do subscribe and watch for updates, notices of outages, etc.

Ok, so on to your question.  You'd like the total # of articles for each wiki.  I think the simplest way right now is to query the AQS (Analytics Query Service) API, documented here: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Wikistats_2

To get the # of articles for a wiki, let's say en.wikipedia.org, you can get the timeseries of new articles per month since the beginning of time:

https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/edited-pages/new/en.wikipedia.org/all-editor-types/all-page-types/monthly/2001010100/2018032900

 

Unless I'm mistaken, summing up these monthly numbers would yield 3.5 million articles

- but English Wikipedia has already over 5 million per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics . Do you get a different result?

In general, it's worth being aware that there are various subtleties involved in defining article counts precisely, as detailed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_counts_revisited . (But not too much aware, that's not good for your mental health. Seriously, that page is a data analyst's version of a horror novel. Don't read it alone at night.)

And to get a list of all wikis, to plug into that URL instead of "en.wikipedia.org", the most up-to-date information is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix in table form or via the mediawiki API: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=sitematrix&formatversion=2&format=json&maxage=3600&smaxage=3600.  Sometimes new sites won't have data in the AQS API for a month or two until we add them and start crunching their stats.

The way I figured this out is to look at how our UI uses the API: https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/new-pages.  So if you were interested in something else, you can browse around there and take a look at the XHR requests in the browser console.  Have fun!

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 12:54 AM, Zainan Zhou (a.k.a Victor) <zzn@google.com> wrote:

Hi Dan,

How are you! This is Victor, It's been a while since we meet at the 2018 Wikimedia Dev Summit. I hope you are doing great.

As I mentioned to you, my team works on extracting the knowledge from Wikipedia. Currently it's undergoing a project that expands language coverage. My teammate Yuan Gao(cc'ed here)  is tech leader of this project.She plans to monitor the list of all the current available wikipedia's sites and the number of articles for each language, so that we can compare with our extraction system's output to sanity-check if there is a massive breakage of the extraction logic, or if we need to add/remove languages in the event that a new wikipedia site is introduced to/remove from the wikipedia family.

I think your team at Analytics at Wikimedia probably knows the best where we can find this data. Here are 4 places we already know, but doesn't seem to have the data.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias. has the information we need, but the list is manually edited, not automatic
• https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm, has the full list, but the information seems pretty out of date(last updated almost a month ago) 
  
• StatsV2 UI: https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects, I can't find the full list nor the number of articles
• API https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/ suggested by elukey on #wikimedia-analytics channel, it doesn't seem to have # of article information

Do you know what is a good place to find this information? Thank you!

Victor

 •  Zainan Zhou(周载南) a.k.a. "Victor" 

 •  Software Engineer, Data Engine

 •  Google Inc.

 •  zzn@google.com - 650.336.5691

 •  1600 Amphitheathre Pkwy, LDAP zzn, Mountain View 94043

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yuan Gao <gaoyuan@google.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 4:15 PM
Subject: Monitor the number of Wikipedia sites and the number of articles in each site
To: Zainan Victor Zhou <zzn@google.com>
Cc: Wenjie Song <wenjies@google.com>, WikiData <wikidata@google.com>

Hi Victor,

as we discussed in the meeting, I'd like to monitor:

1) the number of Wikipedia sites

2) the number of articles in each site

Can you help us to contact with WMF to get a realtime or at least daily update of these numbers? What we can find now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias, but the number of Wikipedia sites is manually updated, and possibly out-of-date.

The monitor can help us catch such bugs.

--

Yuan Gao

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--

Tilman Bayer
Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB