Wikipedia passes one hundred million edits

As of just a few hours ago, the English Wikipedia has passed 100,000,000 edits made by its users. The milestone, while not as significant as 1.5 million articles or 1 million media files, does raise a few interesting points about the website.

First, and most obviously, is the absolutely insane rate at which people contribute to the site. While perhaps half a million or more of those edits have been made by automated bots (such as AntiVandalBot, which clocks up several thousand per day), the vast majority are made by humans editing pages manually. That’s an amazing feat: even with the aid of semi-automated tools, that’s an extraordinary number of edits.

Secondly is that, if you were to refresh the statistics page a few times, you’d see the number of edits fluctuate by thousands of edits per second. And it doesn’t always rise, either: it’s not uncommon to see the number drop sharply from second to second, then rise again. This is a pretty good demonstration of how the rate of editing compares with the rate of deletion at Wikipedia: a huge number of pages — not just articles, but also talk pages, pages in the “Wikipedia” namespace, and so on — are deleted, along with their edits.

I’m really impressed by how rapidly Wikipedia has grown, and encouraged about the future. I wonder if it will take another six years to make it to 200,000,000 edits?

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