Manual:Article count

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 ").

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
If, for whatever reason, you want to count articles if they contain a comma, you can set the variable $wgUseCommaCount to true in your LocalSettings.php.