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 and the rate has continued climbing generally faster than the rate of new article creation has climbed since.
The early spike is almost certainly the conversion script artifact.
Perhaps rambot has nothing to do with it, but the bio creation behavior did change around that time.
You need to look at smoothed data because there is a huge weekly cycle in all WP data. ;)
A non-exponential graph focusing on the months right around the rambot push would make this more clear. Are the raw numbers available somewhere?
Linked directly from the image page.