Wiktionary:Page count
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Problem
A great deal of attention is paid to the number of entries in various wikis. The count used is the "NUMBEROFARTICLES" magic word, here at present: 8,174,499
In spite of better counts being available (WT:STAT), people will insist on using this as the "official" statistic.
We use a number of templates on our stub entry pages ("soft redirects") that do not result in any wikilinks directly in the text. The resulting pages are not counted, as they do not contain [[ (yes, that is what the MediaWiki software looks for. Not links, but that string on the page!)
Fix?
We have been adding links in various templates to make the pages "count"; this is often okay, but causes various problems and incompatibilities. And is a kludge.
The fix described here is to add {{count page|]}} to such pages. They will then count in NUMBEROFARTICLES, and link to the template, they are easy to find if and when desired.
AutoFormat has been taught to add this link when there is none other, and remove it when not needed. So no editor ever need bother with the template. Bots that "know" that they are creating a link-less entry can add it, or just let AF get to it sometime.
This is also a kluge, but it doesn't interact with the other templates, and thus cause gratuitous problems. The string is added at the end of the page. Someone reading the wikitext will find a (manual link) reference to this page.
Why a template?
Firstly, we do want it to link to something, so they are easy to find. In this case Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:count page.
More importantly, things reading the wikitext usually know to ignore contents of templates that are not understood. If they do expand the template (by any of several methods), it will just expand to nothing. Other contrivances might either break something, or cause extraneous output.