Wikipedia:Protection statistics

Traffic-weighted statistics

A 2015 paper by Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw found that 14% of pageviews are to edit-protected or move-protected articles. "Among the top 1,000 most viewed articles during each of these hours, an average of 342 were protected."

Unweighted statistics

This section documents the number and percentage of articles (any length, not including redirects), that are under some kind of edit protection, as of Jan 31 2020. Statistics were calculated from Special:ProtectedPages and Special:StablePages. Move-protected articles are not included.

The total number of articles at the time of this report was 6,007,216.

• Semiprotected articles: 10,430 (0.17%)
• Extended-confirmed protected articles: 1424 (0.024%)
• Fully protected articles: 15 (0.00025%)
• Article under pending changes protection: 4032 (0.067%)
• Total: 15901 (0.26%)

The percentages above are percentages of articles, not percentages of content. It's correct to say, "99.74% of Wikipedia articles are open to editing by anyone," but not "99.74% of Wikipedia content is open to editing by anyone."

Live estimates

The {{pp}} template is typically transcluded on articles that are protected. An current estimate of the number of articles being protected can inferred via the number of transclusion in the main space using the Link Count tool.