Wikipedia the largest free online encyclopedia having 3,895,747 content articles, and 26,540,589 pages in total. There have been 522,291,365 edits, 792,182 uploaded files, 16,442,147 registered users, including 1,504 administrators. At a rate of 600 words a minute, twenty-four hours a day, a person could read nearly 27,000,000 words in a month. It is unlikely for any single reader to read all of Wikipedia’s new content. Reading the current incarnation at that rate would take over seven years, and by the time they were done, so much would have changed with the parts they had already read that they would have to start over.

What do Wikipedia’s readers care about? Are you interested to look in to the most popular articles of Wikipedia. There are some tools available online to help you to find the article statistics of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia article Traffic statistics

Go to the site http://stats.grok.se/ and search for an article in the box provided.

We just searched for the article technology, in stats.grok.se, and can be seen that the technology article has been viewed 57491 times in March 2012. This article ranked 1827 in traffic on en.Wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia article statistics (alpha)

This is also a similar tool, which also provides article statistics for a specific period. Just enter the page you want to get the statics report, specify the Wikipedia project (say, English) and enter the period (from – to ) that you want to find the statistics.

Wikipedia itself provided a Wikipedia article statistics. From the below graph we can see that Wikipedia articles are steadily increasing and now it reached at 3,895, 747 content articles.

What you think about the growth of Wikipedia? Can you guess the future of Wikipedia and online free content sites? From the above graph we noticed the article rate increasing steadily, can you predict the growth of articles after few years? Is it reach a steady state? Did Wikipedia will become a paid referring site like Britannica, once it attained the maximum or enough number of articles?