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This article compares the size ofWikipedia with otherencyclopedias and information collections.

Source material from which Wikipedia statistics in this article are derived is available;^[1] theFootnote on WikiStatistics section at the end of this page provides technical discussion of this article.

Currently, theEnglish Wikipedia alone has over7,078,609 articles of any length, and the combined Wikipedias for all other languages greatly exceed the English Wikipedia in size, giving more than29 billion words in 55 million articles in 309 languages.^[2] The English Wikipedia alone has over4.3 billion words,^[3] and hasover95 times as many words as the 120-volume English-languageEncyclopædia Britannica (online), and more words than the enormous 119-volume Spanish-languageEnciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana.

In 2005, the English-language Wikipedia more than doubled in size, and many smaller Wikipedias have grown by a higher multiple.

In June 2011, there were more than11 million articles in all Wikipedias and3.6 million in the English version.^[2][3]

Wikipedia is still in need of muchexpansion andimprovement. Many of the articles are of poor quality and some mainstream encyclopedia topics are not covered adequately. In addition, the average article length is only a little over half the size of that inEncyclopædia Britannica, although many major articles are considerably longer.^{[citation needed]} Over time the balance of the editorial effort is expected to slowly tilt towards a greater emphasis on increasing the quality, scope, classification and interlinkage of existing articles. However, new articles will probably always be created in large numbers, as Wikipedia's conventions on acceptable article topics incorporate huge numbers of potentialnew articles every year (newly prominent people, current events, media products, physical products, etc.). In mid-2006, the rate of new article creation was still rising, but only slowly. As of January 2007^[update], it looked as if the rate of article creation may have peaked in mid-2006, though subsequent analysis may show otherwise. SeeWikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth for more on Wikipedia's growth rate and expected future size.

There are many other online databases which combine several encyclopedias andencyclopedic dictionaries and allow users to search all of the works simultaneously. One example isOxford Reference Online—a database of 221 encyclopedias and encyclopedic dictionaries, offering about 1.4 million articles as of 2011^[update], with expansions planned for the future.^[4] Another example isXrefplus, which offers access to 262 encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference books.^[5] This all added up to about 2.9 million entries when the database had 225 titles.^[6] There also is HighBeam Research andGaleNet.GaleNet—which is likely the largest named so far—offers users the ability to search several encyclopedia databases, including theBiography Resource Center (1,335,000 people),Gale Virtual Reference Library (594 reference books),^[7] and theScience Resource Center (51 titles),^[8] among others.

The largest paper encyclopedia ever produced is possibly theYongle Encyclopedia, completed in 1407 in 11,095 books, 370 million Chinese characters and commissioned by theYongle Emperor.^[9] The individual books that made up the encyclopedia were small by modern standards; the work was twelve times the size of the 20 million word FrenchEncyclopédie,^[10] giving 240 million words, or 21,600 words per book, although it is unclear if that is how it differs from theEncyclopédie in size. It is also unclear if it is twelve times larger than the original 28-volume version of theEncyclopédie completed in 1772 or the 35-volume version completed in 1780. TheYung-lo ta-tien was a collection of excerpts and entire existing works, rather than an original work. Only two copies were made and all that survives is a small fraction of one copy.

Numbers regarding total characters are based on an estimated average word length of five, plus a space, or six characters per word.

*Classical Chinese is a very compact language. The result is very short articles for the same content.

^†It is said that the Yongle Encyclopedia is larger than the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, but it is uncertain how they were compared.

^‡Kenneth F. Kister,Kister's best encyclopedias: a comparative guide to general and specialized encyclopedias, (1994) p. 450. [Article count is for the 82-volume edition, rather than the 119-volume one.]

^§Alfieri, G. Treccani Degli. "Enciclopedia italiana"Diccionario Literario (2001 HORA, S.A.)

^**Number of encyclopedic articles. TheNationalencyklopedin totals 356,000 entries.

^††Kister, op. cit., p. 365.

**Includes 10,000 historical archives.

^‡‡Advertised as containing "over 63,000 articles...with 36,000-plus map locations, and over 29,000 editor-approved Web site links." The 2006 Premium CD-ROM had 68,000 articles.^[16]

^⁑Advertised as containing 41,500 articles written by 6,803 authors, 60 million of words, 350 million of characters, 360,000 links, 122,000 definitions in the included dictionary, 130,000 bibliographical references.^[17]

Parts of this Wikipedia page (those related to section) need to beupdated. Please help update this Wikipedia page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page.(May 2023)

Note that Wikipedia is neither adictionary nor aweb index; these figures are just for order-of-magnitude comparison.

The Print Wikipedia project published all of the English Wikipedia text, without photos, as of 2015 in 7473 volumes with 700 pages each (5.2 million pages in total).Lulu is willing to sell each volume for US$80, and the whole set for US$500,000.^[22]

As of July 2015^[update], there were approximately 23 billion characters. Assuming 5,000 characters per page that would yield 4.6 million pages. If you then add 25% for extra space for photos, tables, and diagrams, that would yield 5.75 million pages. This would produce 14,375 volumes of 400 pages each. As an example, allowing US$0.05 per page would yield a cost of US$287,500 without binding.

Very detailed statistics for almost all aspects of Wikipedia are available fromhttps://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm.

Statistics for this page are taken from theArticle count (alternate) table and from theWords 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 millionbona 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.

• Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth
• Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia (focuses on article count)
• Wikipedia:Largest encyclopedia
• Wikipedia:Statistics
• Wikipedia:Statistics Department
• User:Emijrp/All human knowledge

• Wikipedia statistics