Village Pump (technical) - "4,122,002 Articles in English"

"4,122,002 Articles in English"

...so says the front page. But it's not, though, is it? That includes redirects and disambiguation pages, which you can't claim to be articles. There are 222,842 disambiguation pages alone; there's no equivalently easy way of counting redirects, but there must be a hell of a lot. (Perhaps someone with Toolserver access could produce a figure.) I try to assume good faith, but if I'm right (I may well be misunderstanding something though) it strikes me as borderline dishonest to report the combined figure as "articles" on the front page in this way. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC) Edit: qualify statement so as not to sound rude. Insertion marked. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:37, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The figure 4,123,716 is pulled from the variable {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}. However, the MediaWiki documentation states that {{PAGESINNS:0}} differs from {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} in that the former includes redirects and disambiguation pages - this implies that {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} does not. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:18, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks. The figure on the front page links to Special:Statistics, which presents the figure as being "content pages", linking to Special:AllPages. However, the list on that page begins with !, which is a redirect. It would be beneficial to have some precise clarification on the matter from a developer. Either way, I would suggest that some wordage on this matter is added to relevant places to avoid any further ambiguity. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:32, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The Special:Allpages link is a bit misleading, I agree (though no doubt well-intended) - a link to the definition of the phrase "content pages" would be better. I vaguely recall we had something like this on Special:Statistics many years ago. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:09, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I just found Bugzilla: 33277 which addresses this point. — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Redirects aren't counted in that total, though disambiguation pages are, and a small number of things which are technically articles aren't. The value is generated using the NUMBEROFARTICLES "magic word" (4,123,716), which is apparently defined as "Number of pages in content namespaces", using the definition at mw:Manual:Using_custom_namespaces#Content_namespaces - so no redirects and at least one internal link. There are well over a million redirects (the largest category is 955k) but I'm not sure of an exact total. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:25, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks - had an edit conflict with you here. See my comment above as well. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:32, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

We have 5,724,232 redirects in namespace 0 at the time of posting. - TB (talk) 18:15, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I've just come across Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace which is where I'm guessing that figure came from. Useful report. — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:34, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I see that the report shows four redirects from category space. This figure should be zero: how do we find which are the redirects? Special:ListRedirects is useless - it doesn't permit a namespace filter, even if you try to put one in the URL, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:08, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Using the API i only see one: Category:X2. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 21:01, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I get the same result with AWB (special page → make list → all redirects → Category: namespace). Category:X2 is explicitly a testing category per the page history and should be left as a redirect. jcgoble3 (talk) 21:07, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Ah - I generated the above figure on the Toolserver. I see three redirects from category space; Category:Ming_Empire, Category:X2 and Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_sockpuppets_of_RevAntonio. The fourth one counted on Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace seems to have been deleted within the last 20 hours. - TB (talk) 21:47, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Now that I've been set straight (always happy to be corrected) about redirects, does it sound fair to suggest that maybe the figure for articles shouldn't include disambiguations? — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:46, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

There would be NO way to count that, because a large number (I'd guess well over half) of disambiguation pages don't have '(disambiguation)' as part of their title. Though I guess one could use articles with Category:Disambiguation pages -- but my gut tells me that 144,646 pages is very low, so there's probably many without the category. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 20:56, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

While not every disambiguation page has {{disambig}} or a similar template, I suspect the vast majority do - so deducting the 244k figure below, which is generated from these templates, would seem to be a good first approximation. You'd also want to account for set indexes such as USS Enterprise (37k pages), which aren't technically disambiguation pages but behave much the same way for readers. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:17, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Good catch - I rarely encounter those. Melodia, even if the figure for disambiguations isn't accurate - and I think that Andrew is right in saying that most of them are categorized - it will get more accurate over time. And even incorrect, it still helps to make the total count of articles more representative of reality. — Hex (❝?!❞) 22:14, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I missed this discussion in starting a thread at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Correct_the_Main_Page_.22article_count.22, which includes an autocalculation method for excluding disambiguation pages based on Category:All article disambiguation pages. Not sure how or whether to merge these threads; anyone feel free to do whatever seems best. Rd232 talk 21:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

This has been tried before. Graham87 12:21, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

That discussion (2008) seems mainly to center on what the definition of an article worth counting is, which is probably why it fizzled out - shades of counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. I don't propose to rule out pages on the basis of being a stub, merely on being disambiguations or set indices, which definitely aren't articles. However, it did lead to the creation of {{Number of actual articles}} (producing "3,863,068") which uses the technique that Rd232 suggested on the other pump. I've just updated it to subtract set indices as well. — Hex (❝?!❞) 13:00, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

From WP:SETINDEX: "A set index article is not a disambiguation page" (note the shortcut WP:NOTDAB); "Fundamentally, a set index article is a type of list article"; etc. That section repeatedly uses the word "article" in reference to set indices. Perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss them as non-articles? jcgoble3 (talk) 01:59, 19 December 2012 (UTC)