Knowledge · Crowdsourced Knowledge
English Wikipedia Articles
An exponential that is visibly running out of new things to write about.
- Wikipedia’s own dated milestones
- 1M in 2006, 7M in 2025
- 1M→2M took 18 months; 6M→7M took 5 years
- English only: all-language 68M is bot-inflated
English Wikipedia launched on 15 January 2001 and now holds 7,235,239 articles. Each point here is a milestone the project dated precisely as it happened: half a million articles on 18 March 2005, one million on 1 March 2006, then two, three, four, five, six and seven million, the last on 28 May 2025, plus today’s live count. Plotted that way, the curve tells on itself. The jump from one to two million took eighteen months; the jump from six to seven million took more than five years. This is what growth looks like as it runs out of easy room: the obvious topics get written, each new article is more obscure than the last, and what was once explosive settles into a crawl. A note on scope: this is English only, deliberately. Counting all languages gives a much larger figure, around 68 million, but a large share of that is machine-generated stubs, most notoriously the millions of near-identical articles a bot called Lsjbot created on Cebuano and other languages, so the all-language total measures bot output as much as human knowledge. English, written and curated by people, is the honest version of the metric, and it remains the single most cited source in the corpora that train large language models.
| Year | Value | Note | Projected |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2005 | 500,000 articles | 500,000 (18 Mar 2005) | |
| February 2006 | 1,000,000 articles | 1 million (1 Mar 2006) | |
| September 2007 | 2,000,000 articles | ||
| August 2009 | 3,000,000 articles | ||
| July 2012 | 4,000,000 articles | ||
| November 2015 | 5,000,000 articles | ||
| January 2020 | 6,000,000 articles | 6 million (23 Jan 2020) | |
| May 2025 | 7,000,000 articles | 7 million (28 May 2025) | |
| September 2026 | 7,235,239 articles | Live count, Sep 2026 |