Editing Encyclopedia:Size comparisons (section)

==Footnote on Wikipedia statistics==
Very detailed statistics for almost all aspects of Wikipedia are available from [https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm].

Statistics for this page are taken from the '''Article count (alternate)''' table and from the '''Words''' table. 

Excluding redirect pages, there are roughly (using figures from September 1, 2006):
* 1.4 million articles that have at least a single link.
* 1.3 million articles that have at least a single link and 200 readable characters (roughly equivalent to at least 33 words).

Taking the difference of these two figures, there are about:
* 100,000 articles that have at least a single link but fewer than 200 characters.

There is also an uncounted number of articles which have no links. The current statistics provide no indication of the size of this last category. The 609 million words in fact span the 1.3 million [[bona fide]] articles, the remaining 100,000 linked articles, and the unknown number of articles without links. A rough estimate of the word count in the latter two categories is ten million words.  Dividing the remaining 600 million words by 1.3 million gives a mean article length of about 460 words.

Further, of the articles on the English Wikipedia, perhaps 36,000 are "data dumped" [[gazetteer]] entries about towns and cities in the United States. It is controversial whether gazetteer entries should count towards the number of "real" encyclopedia articles; however, their statistical significance is very much less now than in October 2002 when they were added.  Very many have been colonised by Wikipedians who have transformed them to varying extents, in some cases to an unimpeachably encyclopedic status.