Pete, I think you're not reading the evidence correctly, but I think that we need to make sure we get this right. Forecasting the future is tricky enough, and we can only do it well if we understand the past.
So I invite real scrutiny of all these numbers, because I really need to know the right answer.
- The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)
Look at pageviews per day... February 2004 3.01 million June 2004, 5.28 million
For the intervening months, there are significant problems with the averages due to some missing data. (For example, several days in April are in the dataset and part of the denominator but clearly have missing data, for example showing 94 pageviews in a day.)
Additionally, it is a very big mistake when talking about growth to focus solely on en. En is not the fastest growing wikipedia, in terms of traffic percentages.
You can see the growth better here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm
Notice in particular the dramatic spike in June which is continuing unabated into July. This spike, I believe, corresponds with the acquisition of new servers.
- The Wikipedia Statistics pages
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)
A better page (to get the global perspective) is here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm
It does seem true that the number of new wikipedians peaked in March, but notice the big spike in de.wikipedia which distorts the statistic to some degree. en has experienced similar spikes before, and the subsequent decline after a spike was not indicative of the long term trend, which continues generally to be strongly positive.
- Alexa
- see the following graph
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=lar... which shows Wikipedia has not grown in the last four/five months.
Given that we know traffic has more than doubled in that time frame, this bears taking a closer look.
I think this picture is more informative: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=lar...
Here, you have to remember that the chart is logarithmic, *and* that increases in rank require different increases in traffic as different scales. That is, to go from #10,000 to #1,000 is less of an achievement than to go from #1,000 to #100. (Almost any website can spike into the top 1,000 if it gets press coverage of the right sort.)
Look at that picture and recognize that if we blipped up to #1, it would look like a minor blip, due to the logarithmic nature of the chart.
Alexa shows our 3 mos change as being +86 (in rank), and since we are already in the ballpark of 600, that representents a substantial traffic increase.
And finally, Alexa numbers are fun to look at, but they do not accurately represent real traffic numbers. If you look up Bomis on there, you'll see a precipitous decline -- but from our perspective (at Bomis), traffic was stable for that same time period. (Of course being stable while everyone else is growing is one possible explanation, but another explanation is that Alexa stats are questionable anyway.)
After a chat with the developers yesterday, I'm comfortable (for now) with the number of 360 million pageviews per month. If that's wrong, I need to know soon, because I'm going to say that number in public.
--Jimbo