Editing Encyclopedia:Size of Wikipedia (section)

== Size of the English Wikipedia database ==
[[File:Wikipedia article size in gigabytes.png|thumb|200px|Total article text in English Wikipedia, measured in gigabytes (compressed).<ref>Data from [[:en:Wikipedia:Database download]]</ref>]]

There are various elements of the [[Wikipedia:Database download|Wikipedia database]] to consider when describing its size. The most obvious include the markup text of the articles, templates, media/file descriptions, and primary meta-pages that would be needed to render the text of the latest version of the current encyclopedia proper. The associated talk pages and the other [[Wikipedia:Namespace|namespaces]] (User, Wikipedia, Help, etc.) are often considered separately. Each of these has an associated edit history, etc. In addition, there are the images and other multimedia (stored in common across all Wikipedias). It is important to take into account whether the data is compressed and if so what compression scheme is used. Besides the English Wikipedia, there are hundreds of Wikipedias in other languages to consider, as well.

In April 2010, the size of the full English Wikipedia edit history was 5.6 TB uncompressed.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/04/full-history-dump-for-english-wikipedia-is-back/|title=Full history dump for English Wikipedia is back – Infodisiac|publisher=  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180828103211/http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/04/full-history-dump-for-english-wikipedia-is-back/|archive-date=28 August 2018|accessdate=1 January 2017}}</ref>

As of June 2015, the dump of all pages with complete edit history in [[XML]] format at [https://web.archive.org/web/20160211190907/https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20150602/ enwiki dump progress on 20150602] is about 100 GB compressed using [[7-Zip]], and 10 TB uncompressed.

As of May 2015, the current version of the English Wikipedia article / template / redirect text was about 51 GB uncompressed in XML format.

The size of the article text in the English Wikipedia, measured in gigabytes (compressed), grew steadily from 1 GB in 2006 to 9 GB in 2013 to 11.5 GB in 2015 as shown in the chart. However, due to an error in compiling the data dump for April 2016, the size of the article text shrunk by approximately 9 percent to 10.8 GB compressed (though the actual size of the article text grew in reality, which can be seen by comparing with the March 2016 and May 2016 data dumps).<ref>https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20160407/{{dead-link}}</ref> Likewise, there is also a similar error when compiling the April 20, 2018 data, showing as 12.85 GB (again, the actual size of the article text grew in reality as can be seen by comparing the previous and following months).<ref>https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20180420/{{dead-link}}</ref>

As of February 2013, the XML file containing current pages only, no user or talk pages, was 42,987,293,445 bytes uncompressed (43 GB). The XML file with current pages, including user and talk pages, was 93,754,003,797 bytes uncompressed (94 GB). The full history dumps, all 174 files of them, took 10,005,676,791,734 bytes (10 TB).<ref>[[m:Data_dumps/FAQ]]</ref>

As of August 2023, Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias contained 96,519,778 files, totalling 470,991,810,222,099 bytes (428.36 TB). <ref> {{cite web|url=https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics|title=Media statistics of wikimedia commons|publisher=[[wikimedia]]|accessdate=28 August 2023}}</ref> 

Other sources for recent size estimates are:
* [[m:Data dumps]]
** [[m:Data dump torrents]]
* [[m:Mirroring Wikimedia project XML dumps/estimates]]
* [http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm Wikipedia Statistics - Tables - English]
* [[mail:xmldatadumps-l|xmldatadumps-l - Monthly updates]]