Wikipedia:Pruning 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.

Shortcut WP:PRUNE

Although Wikipedia, today, has fewer than 7 million articles (plus millions of red-link articles), the total number of revisions is over 1.2 billion. Currently, the article count is 6,829,465 articles, with 1,221,742,346 total revisions, giving an average^[1] of 179 revisions per article.

Sometimes people are worried that the number of articles or edits is a problem. It isn't, but it is friendly to your fellow humans to try 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.