I was trying to get the word count in MediaWiki for my Free Online Encyclopedia Project and finally could get it working. If you are looking for something like that, you can get it.
You need to edit the template file and add this
<?
// Getting the total words count
global $wgUser, $wgArticle, $db;
//check if its an article
if($wgArticle && !$_GET['action']) {
$c=$wgArticle->getContent();
$stripped= strip_tags($c);
$exploded=explode(" ", $stripped);
//you can print this variable anywhere you want on the page
$totalwords=count($exploded);
}
?>
