Manual:Article count

is a Magic word that returns the number of all articles. By default, a new page in the main namespace (the one without a prefix like "User:" or "Talk:") will be counted as an article in the statistics and the variable (on this project it currently gives ) if it contains at least one wiki link (e.g. the text " Main Page "). Which namespaces are used can be controlled by $wgContentNamespaces

Before this count was used, an article was counted if it contained at least one comma. That method proved to be unreliable in many languages where the comma does not have much or any significance (see Article count reform for the process which led to this outcome). However, the comma count is still common in the wiki world; see, e.g., BiggestWiki.

Changing the MediaWiki article count settings
Before MediaWiki 1.18, the method used to count articles was determined by the configuration variable $wgUseCommaCount (now deprecated). Since 1.18, the variable $wgArticleCountMethod is used.

In DefaultSettings.php, the default setting for $wgUseCommaCount is  and for $wgArticleCountMethod , which means  counts all pages in the main name namespace that are not a redirect and contain at least one wiki link. This includes stubs containing a link, and disambiguation pages.

In recent versions of MediaWiki, the existence of links is checked against the values that you also find in the database tables, including not only pagelinks but also templatelinks, categorylinks and imagelinks.

To change to a different method, use one of the following approaches.

MW 1.18 and after

 * Define the article count method with the variable $wgArticleCountMethod.

MW 1.17 and before

 * If you want to count articles only if they contain a comma, you can set the variable $wgUseCommaCount to  in LocalSettings.php.

Updating article count statistics
If you want to recount your statistics to reflect the change to comma-based "good article" count (that doesn't happen automatically), run updateArticleCount.php from a command line.

If you only have access to the database you can get an approximation with a query similar to the following, which however only checks page links (similar to the "link" method):