On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 8:24 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One very interesting Citizendium statistic is the median article
length in words. It has been reducing by about 6 words a month for
years. I think that means most of the new articles being created are
stubs, or not much more than stubs, and nobody is working on expanding
existing articles. I feign no hypotheses for why this might be. I
don't have comparable statistics for Wikipedia, so for all I know we
are doing the same thing (although that seems unlikely now that
article creation has reduced).
At Eric Zachte's stats page there are a number of relevant stats measured.
Firstly there is average bytes per article. For most projects, this is
increasing steadily over time:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesBytesPerArticle.htm
Then there are a couple indicative of the number of stubs and
short-to-medium-length articles, percentage over 500 bytes of readable
text (ie not markup) and percentage over 2000 bytes of readable text
(although the URL would suggest 1500 bytes?). Most projects seem to
hit and maintain a stable level in the 500 byte chart, and build
steadily on their level in the 2000 byte chart:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesGt500Bytes.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesGt1500Bytes.htm
There are charts available too as well as tables.
There's also this tool of mine which shows a graph of the distribution
of article sizes (caches results, but can be a bit slow if it hasn't
been run on a particular project in a while):
http://toolserver.org/~thebainer/articlesizes/
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com