Ziko van Dijk, 06/08/2013 02:12:
Hello, When in 2008 I made some observations on language versions, it struck me that in some cases the wikisyntax and the "meta article information" was more KB than the whole encyclopedic content of an article. For example, the wikicode of the article "Berlin" in Upper Sorabian consisted of more than 50 % characters for categories, interwiki links etc. This made me largely disregarding the cooncerning features of the Wikimedia statistics.
You'd better not disregard it completely, as it is used as a key metric for evaluating e.g. the WMF university programs (whether a good or a bad thing). ;-) I don't know how sophisticated a variant of the metric they use; probably whatever the new metrics.wmflabs.org uses.
Personally, I often find the database size on WikiStats tables a useful one to check the evolution of a single wiki, as it's less fluctuating and harder to cheat than other metrics, short of huge bot imports. It requires greater care in cross-wiki comparisons, of course.
Nemo