In short: the number of wiki pages in the world must currently - Sep 02, 2003 - be passing the 1,000,000 number. If you google for 'RecentChanges' you get the answer 'about 714.000' hits. As there is little reason that normal webpages contain this text, we may assume that these are English wiki pages.

We may also assume that only about 70% of wiki pages are English and contain a rc link. We may also assume that there is and will be always a considerable percentage of wiki pages that are not yet indexed. So this estimate is on the safe side.

ThankYouWard

''Please clarify in your verbiage if you mean the c2 Wiki count, or the count of all Wiki pages in the world, and the math involved. If the latter, Google counts references to pages, not pages, so their numbers are skewed.''

''Sorry to be a spoil sport (and, as always, ThankYouWard), but engineering minds want to know!''

I'm not the original contributor, but I think you haven't read this carefully enough. Put RecentChanges into Google and, as you say, you get a count of those pages that contain "RecentChanges". Every Wiki page will contain that word, and very few others (I'd guess), so the count you get is most likely the number of wiki pages in the world.

Yes?

Yes, that's what I meant. I thought it was clear the c2 pages were not meant because we know this number to be about 25000+. Sorry for being unclear. -- HelmutLeitner

Google only lists the first and second citation on each server. --Phlip ''Yes, but there is a "[More results from this server]" link and these pages are included into the count. -- hl''

Google's numbers may be heavily skewed. See this page:
  http://www.google.com/search?q=recentchanges&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&start=800&sa=N

They are also hard to verify. See this one:
  http://www.google.com/search?q=recentchanges&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&start=990&sa=N&filter=0