Get total number of articles from a MediaWiki wiki programmatically

Question

How can I get the total number of articles using the MediaWiki API?

I couldn't find it in the docs:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Search
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching#Search_engine_features

Even a rough approximation is fine.

Answer 1

Use the link http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics and read the property articles of the statistics tag.