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Note

The datasets below are old (2006-7), tiny, and not useful except as a historical reference.

Random article survey

I was bored waiting for my very slow program to run, so I clicked "random article" 250 times and kept track of what kinds of articles popped up. 48 articles (19.2%) were stubs or had at least one cleanup tag. (I tried to count "citation needed" as a cleanup tag but may have missed a few.) The results as of 11 Nov 2006:

Type of article	Number	Percent of sample
Biography	60	24%
Places/geographical locations	34	13.6%
TV shows/movies	17	6.8%
Disambiguation	15	6%
Music/bands/albums	14	5.6%
Company/product/service	13	5.2%
History/war	12	4.8%
Politics/government	9	3.6%
Sports	8	3.2%
Organisms	8	3.2%
Definitions/common phrases/common objects	7	2.8%
Architecture/buildings	7	2.8%
Mythology/religion	5	2%
Astronomy/physics/space science	5	2%
Software/computing	5	2%
Games (including video)	4	1.6%
Literature/publications	4	1.6%
Biology/medicine	3	1.2%
Food/drink	3	1.2%
Schools	3	1.2%
Math	2	0.8%
Nonsense/unclassifiable	2	0.8%
Visual arts	2	0.8%
Philosophy/ethics	2	0.8%
Linguistics/languages	2	0.8%
Charities/nonprofit organizations	2	0.8%
Economics/finance	1	0.4%
Deleted and protected	1	0.4%

"Biography" is probably a bit overinflated because I classified everything about an individual real person as a biography, including historical figures. Articles about fictional characters went in the category of the corresponding fiction (TV, myth, etc.)

Obviously this is a lousy way to determine Wikipedia coverage - 250 articles is a tiny sample. But the advantage over, say, counting category populations is that this avoids duplicate-counting of articles in multiple categories and can find articles that are un- or miscategorized. Special:Random also (as far as I know) excludes recently created articles that haven't yet been indexed, which filters out lots of nonsense speedy candidates. I don't think Special:Random would exclude deletion candidates, but none of these had prod or AfD templates.

First-glance observations:

I didn't find a single chemistry article. Biology and medicine had one clinical feature, one cell biology article, and one disease, so not even any biochemistry showed up. Physics as such was also missing; the articles in that category were almost entirely about NASA missions and observations.
Similarly, nothing I'd classify as sociology or psychology.
The literature and publications category contains a comic book, a newspaper, and two contemporary novels. No classic/canon literature.
I admit I'm a bit surprised at the low volume of school articles, which judging from AfD are infesting the place like weeds.
Somehow I don't think that 14% of the sum of all human knowledge is TV, movies, games, and bands. I admit I was surprised at the low percentage of video game cruft. The music articles were almost exclusively contemporary popular bands or their albums (with reasonably diverse geographical coverage) - nothing about musical theory and nothing about classical music.

Recent mainspace changes survey

Inspired by Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing and User:Worldtraveller/Wikipedia is failing (NB: leaving the redlink, in case further moves occur), I looked at a sample of 250 mainspace edits covering a time span of 04:43 to 04:46 UTC on 18 Feb 2007. (It would be interesting to gather these statistics again at a time when US schools are in session.) In this sample there were 159 edits by registered users, 89 edits by anonymous users, and 2 edits to a subsequently deleted image description page. Thus the percentages below take 248 edits as the total sample.

Change type	Percent of total sample (n = 248)	Percent by registered editors (n = 248)	Percent by anonymous editors (n = 248)	Percent of all registered edits (n = 159)	Percent of all anonymous edits (n = 89)
Substantial content changes	5.2%	4.0%	1.2%	6.3%	3.4%
Minor content changes	28.6%	17.3%	11.3%	27.0%	31.5%
Copyediting/formatting/wikilinking	40.7%	27.4%	13.3%	42.8%	37.1%
Tagging/maintenance	8.5%	6.5%	2.0%	10.1%	5.6%
Vandalism reversion	8.9%	7.3%	1.6%	11.3%	4.5%
Vandalism	8.1%	1.6%	6.5%	2.5%	18.0%

Other than determining whether an edit was vandalism, I did not make any value judgments. Thus, 'minor content changes' contains considerable amounts of unsourced material and original research that will certainly be reverted.

Other observations:

I saw two ongoing edit wars and one addition of an inappropriate unfree image.
Of the ten examples of substantial content changes by registered users, five were new-page creations. The single largest content change was on a Digimon article.
One of the four examples of vandalism by registered users involved the creation of a nonsense page.
I excluded bot-flagged edits (the default). The registered-editor set contains two edits by a known-bot account without a bot flag.
The percentage of copyediting and formatting done by registered editors is probably inflated by AWB users.

General thoughts:

I suppose it's a good sign that the rate of vandalism and the rate of vandalism reversion are about the same. However, that could be a function of the time of day.
Substantial content addition occurs at a quite low rate. It's possible that this is due to editing patterns: if an editor uses many 'progressive saves', no one change will appear on this sort of survey as substantial, and if an editor uses a single save for a large change, that editor's edit rate will be low and his change will be unlikely to appear in such a small sample. I didn't see much evidence of the first pattern, in that no series of edits to the same article by the same person occurred except to manipulate formatting; however, a series of content-creating edits will likely be separated by more than three minutes.