![]() | This Wikipedia page needs to be updated. Please help update this Wikipedia page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. |
One of the metrics in the Wikipedia:Size comparisons page is the number of words per article. Some Wikipedians anticipate the rate of new article creation eventually slowing down, and effort going instead to improve the quality of existing articles. This page examines a couple of trends loosely associated with quality: the number of words per article, and the number of revisions per article.
In the graph below, which deals with the English Wikipedia, the number of articles (blue, multiplied by 1,000) and revisions (yellow, right hand scale) is increasing very much faster than is the number of words per article (purple).
Note that the hyperlinked nature of wikis tends to produce sets of small articles concerned with different aspects of a subject, while a paper encyclopedia would tend to describe these aspects in a single, larger, article. When comparing according to words per article, these tendencies may lead to Wikipedia's coverage of subjects being underestimated.
The jump seen in the number of articles in October 2002 (and the consequential aberration of the revision statistics) was due to the addition of 36,000 "data dumped" Gazetteer entries about towns and cities in the United States; clearly these were longer than the prevailing mean article length. The volatility of the words per article count in the early stages of Wikipedia's life arises from the relatively low base of articles. Some of the rise in the number of revisions per article from about May 2004 onwards was due to the introduction of a system of categorisation which necessitated revisiting articles in order to apply categorisation.
Extrapolating from this graph, it appears unlikely that the average number of words per page will increase at much more than a snail's pace; it is even possible that the gradient might flatten or fall slightly if the rate of new stub addition eclipses the rate of expansion of existing articles.