Wikipedia:Pruning article revisions

Like a busy Wikipedia editor pruning an article, this arborist is doing a serious trimming on a tree.

Although Wikipedia, today, has fewer than 7 million articles (plus millions of red-link articles), the total number of revisions is over 1.3 billion. Currently, the article count is 6,906,752 articles, with 1,250,947,869 total revisions, giving an average[1] of 181 revisions per article.

Sometimes people are worried that the number of articles or edits is a problem. It isn't, but it is friendly to your fellow humans to try to make it easy to use the article histories in a productive way. One way to do that is to avoid unnecessarily large numbers of revisions for a change, while another is to use more revisions than strictly required so that your edit comments can clearly say what you are doing and why.

  1. ^ The average revisions per article is calculated as the total revisions divided by total pages: avg = #total_edits / #pages, as:
    {{NUMBEROFEDITS:R}} / {{NUMBEROFARTICLES:R}}.

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