Wikipedia:Articlecountitis

This is a humorous essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not 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. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.

Articlecountitis is a disorder that affects Wikipedians, defined as an unhealthy obsession with the number of articles. It has two manifestations: one is primarily dealing with one's own article count (self article-count disorder, or SACD) which is quite similar to editcountitis, and the other is an obsession with one's home Wikipedia's article count, especially in relation to the order of Wikipedias (Wikipedia article-count disorder, or WACD), which was compiled and updated daily on Meta. (Note: statisticians are generally exempt from this, because they don't show symptoms of over-eagerness toward adding articles.)

In the first case, users try to write as many articles as possible under their own username, while in the second case users generally show an unhealthy amount of attention toward milestones, and sometimes dabble with new stub creations. But users might also employ bots to do the bulk of the task, thus their personal article count might be seen as relatively low. Their works are usually documented in the graph of article growth in that particular edition of Wikipedia by a sudden surge in the chart.

The first case is not widely evident, because of lack of a tool to count one's personal articles, and because of its similarity to editcountitis. Therefore when we talk about Articlecountitis, usually it refers to the second case.