Manual:Article count - MediaWiki
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The
article count
is the number of
content pages
on a wiki.
It is available from the wiki's
Special:Statistics
page, from the
{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}
magic word
, and through a "
siteinfo
" query via the
MediaWiki API
By default, a page is counted as an article when:
it's in the main
namespace
(meaning its title doesn't have a prefix like "User:" or "Talk:"),
it contains at least one
internal wikilink
(e.g. the text "[[Main Page]]" creates a wikilink to the page titled "Main Page"), and
it isn't a
redirect
The first criterion can be expanded to consider other namespaces through the use of the
$wgContentNamespaces
variable.
(Note that some
Extensions
do this when they are installed.)
The second criterion can be overridden if the
$wgArticleCountMethod
variable is set to the value "any", in which case
all
non-redirects in content namespaces are counted as articles.
However, when the value "link" is used — which is the default as defined in
DefaultSettings.php
— only pages containing a wikilink are considered.
This includes both stubs and disambiguation pages, provided they contain links.
There is no way to change the third criterion.
Redirects are never counted as articles.
Changing the MediaWiki article count settings
edit
Initially MediaWiki counted a page as an article if it contained at least one comma.
That method proved to be unreliable in many languages where the comma does not have much or any significance. (See
Article count reform
for the process which led to this outcome.)
Before
MediaWiki 1.18
, the method used to count articles was determined by the configuration variable
$wgUseCommaCount
, which was at the same time deprecated and ultimately removed in
MediaWiki 1.24
Since 1.18, the variable
$wgArticleCountMethod
has been used.
While article counting based on commas is still relatively common in the wiki world (see, e.g.,
MeatBall:BiggestWiki
), the ability for MediaWiki to do this was completely removed in
MediaWiki 1.31
In recent versions of MediaWiki, the existence of links is checked by consulting the
pagelinks
database table, so it includes links provided by the transclusion of templates or other pages.
Special links such as category links (which place pages into categories) and file links (which display files) do not count when determining the article status of a page, because those links affect different database tables.
To change to a different method, use one of the following approaches:
MediaWiki version:
1.18
MW 1.18 and after
edit
Define the article count method with the variable
$wgArticleCountMethod
MW 1.17 and before
edit
MediaWiki version:
1.17
If you want to count articles only if they contain a comma, you can set the variable
$wgUseCommaCount
to
true
in
LocalSettings.php
Updating article count statistics
edit
Following a change in article count method you will almost certainly want to recount your wiki to reflect that change (this does not happen automatically). To do so, run
updateArticleCount.php
from the command line.
If you only have access to the database, you can get an approximation to the article count by using a query similar to the following, which only checks page links (similar to the "link" method) in the main namespace:
SELECT
count
distinct
page_id
))
FROM
pagelinks
INNER
JOIN
page
ON
pl_from
page_id
WHERE
page_namespace
AND
page_is_redirect
See also
edit
M:Article counts revisited
2015
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Category
Article
Manual
Article count
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