On 10/17/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/17/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Enwikipedia_articles_bios_200710.svg
And there's the answer. No. Rambot didn't affect the growth of biographies much at all. There's a spike in early 2002 (can someone check out what that is?), but the graph of biographies is basically unaffected by rambot (late 2002, right?).
Thats not true, you just can't see it on that scale. The rate of new article bio creation changed from an average of 4/day around 2002-07 to 15/day in 2003-02
July 2002 to February 2003 is a broad range, and July 2002 was during a period of lots of server downtime.
and the rate has continued climbing generally faster than the rate of new article creation has climbed since.
Well, yes, that's indisputable since the *percentage* has been rising.
The early spike is almost certainly the conversion script artifact.
Yes, that's it.
Perhaps rambot has nothing to do with it, but the bio creation behavior did change around that time.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p-pyYERq1P4N0GKZ6EvRPSw
It seems to me that bio creation increased *before* rambot, which was mid-October 2002. The increase happened in August/September 2002 (first time over 100/week on that graph was week ending 9/26/2002). Next big increase was July 2003 (last time under 100 on that graph was week ending 6/19/2003). I don't see any effect by rambot at all (week ending 10/24/2002 was a ho-hum 81 new bios).
What happened in August/September 2002? Well, July 21, 2002 brought new software on new servers. August 10, 2002 "David A. Wheeler...released html2wikipedia, a tool that translates HTML into Wikipedia's Wiki format." August 15, 2002 "We are now at www.wikipedia.org instead of www.wikipedia.com."
September 21, 2002 "The much-belated import of pre-January 2002 article edit histories from the old software has been done at last!"
October 18-26, 2002: "The so called rambot completed its mass entry of approximately 30,000 articles on U.S. cities. The process which began on October 18, took over a week to finish. It caused lots of discussion and problems with cluttering up the Recent Changes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Announcements_2002
January 22, 2003: Slashdot (this is the spike in the middle of the graph, 138 new bios that week)
You need to look at smoothed data because there is a huge weekly cycle in all WP data. ;)
Yeah, I decided to just go with weekly data.