I just read “Русские народные сказки, Царевна Лягушка” (item http://www.lingq.com/learn/ru/workdesk/99604/ ) once, adjusted the blue arrow accordingly and saw:
“Read: 1 (0 words)”
Although I can copy the content into Word to make a count and then enter the values manually, you may want to edit the item.
Hi Jeff,
This is very strange. We’re trying to figure out what’s happening. We’ll get back to you.
This is the info next to the item (in the store and in my workdesk - the exact values may vary according to your own vocabulary):
Time: 15:25 New Words: -334 (-33400%) Priority LingQs: 3
Some more items with very strange word counts (always negative values - words as well as percentages):
RussianLingQ, #7 Государственные праздники. Statutory Holidays
Русские народные сказки, Снегурочка
Русские народные сказки, Машенька и медведь
RussianLingQ, Beginner #7 - The Power of The Linguist, Part 7
RussianLingQ, Beginner #6 - The Power of the Linguist, Part 6
Yes, there seems to be an issue with recently uploaded content. We are looking into this.
The negative values are proving to be a more troublesome bug than we thought at first. The negative values have now been replaced by 0’s which is also not correct. We will fix this issue some time next week. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Well, they came back to negative again…
How this is affecting our countings? I mean, I’m avoiding to use negative items, but can I’ve been updating a lot of others, and was wondering if I can trust their word counts…
We’re still working on this issue, obviously! 
Don’t worry about using these items. Once it is fixed we will make sure all stats are correct and up to date.
Any news yet? Is it safe to click “update” now as I feel I’m ready with an assignment? Sice the values are now replaced with zeros, I fear that my known words won’t get adjusted.
Both the negative values issue and the words not calculating issue are related. We are working on this but, in the meantime, Mike has assured me that anything you do on the site will be properly reflected in your statistics once the bug has been fixed. So, go ahead and update!
Alright, then I will do so.
Another (possibly related) problem is that when I decide to pick new items, no value is indicated at all (regardless of how I choose to sort them, by “% new words” et.c.) so I only have a clue that this or that item probably has more unknown words than something I recently spent time on, but not how difficult it may be. Thus, quite tricky to know what to choose.
We’ve just realized that the way we calculate New Words and Priority LingQ numbers in the Store and WorkDesk is the major source of slowness in the system. Therefore, we are going to change the way we do this. For now, we have removed these numbers and the ability to sort by these numbers. We hope to have these numbers working again (without slowing up the system!) within the next few days. We will, however, be permanently removing the ability to sort by New Words or Priority LingQs. This sort capability does not appear to be used much and causes many problems for us in terms of calculation.
In other words, I’m sorry that we can’t provide these indicators to help you choose content at the moment but we hope to have them back within a few days.
OK, I guess it’s not important if I see the exact amount of new words, as long as the items suitable for my level are showed in “Recommended Items”.
However, percentages vs. words is sometimes confusing - who knows how that tool “thinks”? I’ve picked items with fairly low percentages (<50%) but with a lot of words (articles lasting 10-15 minutes) as well as the opposite (>50% in a short article going through the alphabet, with two words per letter - a lot easier). The first example takes ages to go through, but I may of course be the only one who prefers a short article with a high percentage of unknown words.
I also like short items with many new words! It’s not just you. 
We’ve now fixed the issue with the word totals so you should now see the correct words of reading number displayed in your status widget in the WorkDesk. We will still be a few days reworking the New Words numbers.