User:Dcljr/Article counts revisited
In May 2011, a MediaWiki developer standardized the way articles (or "content pages") were counted by different parts of the MediaWiki software, which (finally) fixed a bug that had caused the on-wiki article counts (i.e., at Special:Statistics) to become significantly wrong on many Wikimedia wikis. Unfortunately, since the on-wiki statistics were not immediately updated for all wikis, the change went largely unnoticed by the community at large, who continued to use the wrong article counts for the next year (e.g., for announcements at Wikimedia News, and for the stats shown at List of Wikipedias/Table and similar pages).
On 10 May 2012, a script to update the on-wiki article counts on all Wiktionaries and Wikisources was finally run in response to a bug report. This fixed the counts on those projects, but left many other Wikimedia wikis (Wikipedias, Wikiquotes, etc.) with incorrect article counts.
Not all of the remaining wikis have significantly incorrect article counts. Most wikis are less than 100 articles off of the correct count, and most are less than 10% off. However, correcting these counts will cause almost 100 wikis to drop to lower milestone levels than are currently indicated at Wikimedia News#Projects by number of content pages.
For complete details about how this situation occurred, the exact criteria under which a page is counted as an article, and what kinds of changes can be expected when the article counts are fixed on the remaining Wikimedia wikis, please see User:Dcljr/Article counts.
In particular, note that it used to be true that any page (non-redirect) in a content namespace containing the string "[[" would count as an article; now such a page has to contain a regular [[wikilink]] to a page on the same wiki to count as an article. This means category links, image/file links, interlanguage links, and interwiki links no longer count.
Until this can be taken to an actual RFC, please use the talk page to discuss relevant issues and possible proposals.