I recently found that a Wikipedia-related presentation of mine in a
sociological conference (ASA in SF - let me know if anybody else is
going there) got shifted to a Second Life track (it was supposed to be
about online communities in general, but mysterious are the ways of
conference and panel organizers).
So I thought I should at least pay a token attention to SL, and I
thought about a brief numerical comparison. It is possible to consider
the number of total registered accounts (en-Wiki 2009: ~10 mil, other
Wikimedia Foundation projects 2009: ~10 mil, Second Life 2008: ~15 mil)
but I run into a problem trying to get a wiki-equivalent of
"average/highest number of active editors" (SL in early 2008: ~40,000 -
but that's just for people logged in, doesn't say anything about their
activity - one can leave a SL client running in the background... just
like one can be logged in to Wikipedia for weeks).
What about Wiki? After some thought and discussion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Recent_changes_patrol#How_many_…
and a useful tool that was designed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Piotrus#RC_active_users
I begun compiling some stats based on a number of unique editors listed
at RC page. There is still not enough data to see a clear trend, but
numbers seem roughly consistent at about 800 registered users / 400 ips
editing en-Wikipedia per hour and 90/30 per 5 minute periods.
As for Alexa traffic rank, SL is at megere ~4000, compared to our Top
10, but that's of course reflects the fact that Wikipedia is useful for
non-logged in users as well.
I wonder if we can indeed answer whether Wikipedia or SL is more
popular? Wikipedia is more popular in general, but for logged in
(registered) users, which one would be?
--
Piotr Konieczny
"The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in
theory."