currently, an items size is the size of the item's json represenations. It would be more useful to count the number of characters in values or some such. In that case, empty items would have size 0, adding one character to a label would make a size difference of 1, etc.
Version: master
Severity: normal
Whiteboard: u=dev c=backend p=0
See Also:
T41150: [Story] Create Special:EmptyItems
The byte size does not make sense as it represents the internal structure more than anything user-facing.
The only notion of size that makes sense to me is counting separately statements, claims, qualifiers, references, labels, descriptions, aliases and sitelinks.
If we really need to summarize, we could count only "structured data" (number of claims + number of qualifiers), "docstrings" (number of labels + number of descriptions + number of aliases) and sitelinks.
Anyway, I wonder if this task, very old, has been already resolved somehow.