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I am interested to know how many revisions a Wikipedia article has. I can look up its history and count the revisions, but I would like a more direct solution than cumbersome manual counting. Ideas?

How to get the number of revisions of a Wikipedia article?

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  • What do you mean by "review"? Do you mean revisions? Page views? Or something else?
    – ale
    Dec 24, 2014 at 13:44
  • @AlE. This is a good comment and I think I would mostly mean the number of edits of an article. I would like to have that as a proxy for reliability and good state of an article (being aware of the limitations of this anyway)
    – humanityANDpeace
    Dec 24, 2014 at 14:16
  • I have edited your question to make this clear. ("Review" on Wikipedia has a specific meaning. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RVW .) However, I think number of revisions is a poor proxy for reliability and "good state". A high number of revisions only indicates an article is popular, on a controversial subject, and/or old.
    – ale
    Dec 24, 2014 at 14:25

2 Answers 2

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An easy way is to just add ?action=info to your URL. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange?action=info quickly tells you it has been edited 366 times.

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  • 2
    This is also available as a link entitled "Page information" in the "Tools" menu (usually found in the left navigation menu).
    – ale
    Dec 24, 2014 at 14:50
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In combination with what @Ainali suggested, you could use a Google Spreadsheet to further specify your result like so.

Formula

A1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange?action=info

=INDEX(IMPORTHTML(A1, "table", 3), 5)

Screenshot

enter image description here

Explained

The IMPORTHTML function 'imports' the URL, shown in A1, and looks for table number 3. If you're interested in the number of edits only, then use the INDEX formula to show only row 5 of that table.

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