Wikipedia:Article revisions

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Although Wikipedia, today, has fewer than 7 million articles (plus millions of red-link articles), the total number of revisions is over 1.3 billion. Currently, the article count is 6,951,340 articles, with 1,269,849,189 total revisions, giving an average^[1] of 183 revisions per article.

At times, people have worried that the large number of article edits, or revisions, is a problem. There is no technical or cost problem in the numbers of revisions. It is, however, customary to think of how many revisions are actually necessary in order to make it easy to use the article histories in a productive way.

One way to do that is to avoid unnecessarily large numbers of revisions for a change, while another is to use more revisions than strictly required so that your edit comments can clearly say what you are doing and why.