Manual:Article count

is a Magic word that returns the number of all articles (not counting Main Page). 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 ") or is categorized to at least one category.

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.

MW 1.18
Define the article count method with the variable $wgArticleCountMethod.

MW before 1.18
If you want to count articles if they contain a comma, you can set the variable $wgUseCommaCount to true in LocalSettings.php.

The default set in DefaultSettings.php is false.

Otherwise variable NUMBEROFARTICLES counts pages in the main name namespace which contain a link and are not a redirect. This includes stubs containing a link, and disambiguation pages.

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