Ziko van Dijk, 06/08/2013 02:12:
Hello,
When in 2008 I made some observations on language versions, it struck me
that in some cases the wikisyntax and the "meta article information" was
more KB than the whole encyclopedic content of an article. For example,
the wikicode of the article "Berlin" in Upper Sorabian consisted of more
than 50 % characters for categories, interwiki links etc. This made me
largely disregarding the cooncerning features of the Wikimedia statistics.
You'd better not disregard it completely, as it is used as a key metric
for evaluating e.g. the WMF university programs (whether a good or a bad
thing). ;-) I don't know how sophisticated a variant of the metric they
use; probably whatever the new
metrics.wmflabs.org uses.
Personally, I often find the database size on WikiStats tables a useful
one to check the evolution of a single wiki, as it's less fluctuating
and harder to cheat than other metrics, short of huge bot imports. It
requires greater care in cross-wiki comparisons, of course.
Nemo