I think finding a better way to report the human contribution to Wikipedia is a good idea, and counting only those articles that have been edited at least once sounds like a reasonable solution. However, if possible could the raw number of articles that is currently shown on the Main Page be there too? Also, if we made some change to the markup, and some automated conversion needed to be done wouldn't this sort of muck up the article count? Anyway, as long as you keep the plain article total as well I'm happy. I'm on the daily digest, so haven't read any other replies, but one solution to the automated conversion thing could be to not count minor edits, so automated conversions could be labeled minor edits.
ASB