Wikipedia:Time Between Edits

English language Wikipedia measured by time between every 10,000,000th edit

This table and chart measures editing on the English Wikipedia in terms of the time it takes for every ten million edits. This page was originally started by Katalaveno at User:Katalaveno/TBE, and notes in the first person are by them.

There are two ways of measuring edits on Wikipedia, one from the magic word {{REVISIONID}} and the other from {{NUMBEROFEDITS}}. This chart uses the former because it is easy to find the date of any edit by revision ID. The current number of edits is 1,284,718,454

This graph shows the time taken for every ten millionth edit between July 31, 2005, and May 31, 2020. It shows the exponential growth of Wikipedia to 2007 when the gap between 10 million edits dropped to less than 40 days, the slow decline until 2014 when the gap rose again to 73 days, the 2015/16 rally and subsequent steady state at just over 60 days.

Around January 2007, the time between every 10,000,000th edit was about six weeks. It hovered around that mark for about two years, and then began to increase; by August/October 2014 it had nearly reached 10 and a half weeks. Subsequently editing has picked up again with eight and a half to nine weeks being the norm for 2015 and 2016 - the second fastest in over a decade.

The current value for {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} is 1,284,718,454. The most recent oldid can be found by checking the most recent edits in the change log. As of January 13, 2021^[update], the most recent oldid was around 1,000,000,000. There have been roughly 200,000 per day recently, so we seem likely to reach edit number 2,000,000,000 in late 2034.

1. How did this start? I was interested in getting an idea of the overall edit growth on Wikipedia in the last few years. One way I thought to do it was to take a look the time between every 10,000,000th edit. On March 22, 2008, I noticed in the URL of the diffs I was seeing that the oldid value had just passed 200,000,000. So, that gave me 20 data points to start with.
2. I have had queries as to why time is not 'on the x-axis' in this graph. The reason is that I am using, as regular intervals, blocks of 10,000,000 Wikipedia edits, not time. I am specifically examining the number of days (which will vary) between each block of ten million edits. Therefore, in this case, time is dependent upon the number of edits made, so time (measured in days) is the dependent variable and edits (measured in blocks of 10,000,000 edits) is the independent variable.
3. Why is there a Table 1 but no other tables? There used to be a Table 2 but I removed it.
4. Why is {{REVISIONID}} over a hundred million less than whilst {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} is 1,284,718,454? I would prefer to use {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} Keep in mind that the oldid value I am using is the same as the value contained in the magic word {{REVISIONID}} and not the magic word {{NUMBEROFEDITS}}. I would prefer to use {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} as that includes all edits, both existing and deleted. However, there seems to be no way to backtrack that value in time. If I am wrong about that, I would appreciate knowing a method.

• A chart of monthly edits over time from Wikimedia Statistics
• The date calculators (duration & dateadd) can be used to count days.