In T222044#5177914, @Reedy wrote:

reedy@deploy1001:/srv/mediawiki-staging$ mwscript updateArticleCount.php --wiki=bgwikinews --update
Counting articles...found 1580.
Updating site statistics table... done.
reedy@deploy1001:/srv/mediawiki-staging$

In T222044#5142844, @Nemo_bis wrote:

It's good to provide a reason for such changes, to help the developers make sure we're providing the best solution for what the community really wants. (I was curious if there was any language-specific issue to fix.)

In T220299#5105399, @Ammarpad wrote:

Yes, that's an alternative. You've to open a bug report here on phabricator. See example of similar request: T216333. However as this is a site configuration change, normally consensus of local community is required. So you should open such discussion and then link to it in the request.

An editor told me something I had missed - the existence of a MediaWiki setting $wgArticleCountMethod. Should I request that for the Bulgarian-language Wikinews here, or the appropriate way is still as a request to the WMF stewards?

In T220299#5091835, @Ammarpad wrote:

In T220299#5091503, @Grigor_Gatchev wrote:

News articles in a Wikinews would very rarely need to link to other news there - unlike eg. the articles in a Wikipedia, they do not form a topology of interconnected patterns, but are mostly unconnected samples from the reality event stream. So, counting only pages with internal links might be a wrong algorithm, in the context of a Wikinews site.

This looks reasonable, but this task is not for changing the status quo. If you want change it, please open a separate task.

In T220299#5091310, @Ammarpad wrote:

I took a random sample of around 20 pages and I found they have no single internal link (wikilink); they are just plain text. Therefore this may not be an error. @Grigor_Gatchev are you aware that a content page is only counted if it contains at least one internal link? And can you confirm there are more than 66 pages in main namespace that contain such links?