How many active language editions does Wikipedia have?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the number of languages that have enough speakers and enough internet access to sustain a volunteer community. There are several thousand living languages but only a few hundred with a substantial written tradition and an online population — so the answer has to be in the hundreds, not the thousands.

The distribution is extremely skewed, which the explanation hints at: a handful of editions hold most of the articles and most of the traffic, while many exist with only a few thousand entries maintained by a handful of people. An edition count measures how many communities exist, not how much content there is, and those are very different quantities.

The readership point is the genuinely surprising one: the largest edition by article count is only a fraction of total readership worldwide. Most people read in their own language, and the project's global reach comes from the aggregate of smaller editions rather than from the big one. Article counts and reader counts rank the editions completely differently.