# Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia

 related topics {math, number, function} {rate, high, increase} {style, bgcolor, rowspan} {work, book, publish} {system, computer, user} {day, year, event}

This Wikipedia:Statistics page measures the size of the English-language edition of Wikipedia; mostly page and article count. There are currently 3,518,580 articles in the English Wikipedia.

Most of the earlier entries were extracted from Wikipedia:Announcements. Later entries are taken from observations of the new software's built-in article count features.

## Contents

### Wikipedia growth

Wikipedia's growth to date approximately follows a Gompertz growth model. This model is determined by the Gompertz function, $y(t)=ae^{be^{ct}}$, with parameters:

Some characteristics of this model are:

• a pivot point at which the growth is at its peak. For en.wikipedia.org this might have been in August 2006 with 60,000 new articles a month.
• a maximum to the number of articles of about 4.4 million (as determined by parameter a of the model). In reality there will always be new events and people to describe in the future, and these will lead to the creation of perhaps 12,000 new articles a month.

This model is related to the quantity (number of articles). The quality might still increase independently.

### Graphs of size and growth rate

The two graph images show: in the first graph, the projected total articles; and in the second graph, the monthly growth rate, as it has slowed (line sloping downward) since late 2006.

Detailed analysis of the data shows that from 2006 to 2009 the article growth rate followed a six-monthly cycle with faster growth in February and August than in May and November. This cycle does not appear in the growth-rate graph here, because the values shown in the graph have been averaged over periods of six months.

### Annual growth rate

For the English Wikipedia.