--- Pete/Pcb21 pete_pcb21_wpmail@pcbartlett.com wrote on wikien-l:

Christopher Mahan wrote: I've been meaning to find a peg to hang the following post on ever since I lost the post with mav's original 90% growth projections on:

All the evidence (see below) suggests that Wikipedia has *not* grown by a significant amount since the huge explosion in February/March 2004.

Huh? Check out the graph on page one here (again, this model assumes business as usual):

http://meta.wikimedia.org/upload/0/07/Hardware_costs_-_year.pdf

The first big bump was in Q1 2004 (Jan-March) and the second, much larger spike was in June during Q2 2004 (1.21 M hits/day on average). We are still about at the same level (1.23 M hits/day average) as June, which is about the same as the figure in the model I developed (1.29 M hits/day average for July 2004). However that model averages each three month period so we won't know just how close the estimate is until the end of this quarter.*

But replacing the model figure with the current partial one and extrapolating for the rest of the quarter still gives 75% more hits/day for Q3 vs Q2 (the model predicts 85%). That assumes we keep the *same* average we have now for each month this quarter (1.123 M hits/day). Our average may do down but more likely it will increase to at least the modeled figure (I fear it may surpass it).

''However'' I do not think it is a coincidence that this four months of little growth corresponds almost exactly with the period that Wikipedia has "disappered" from Google.

I think we did take a two month hit from that and that may explain why our traffic only grew by 73% from Q1 2004 to Q2 2003 but we also have to take into account that our traffic grew 176% from the last quarter of 2003 to the first quarter of 2004. So that *mere* 73% growth *alone* is in fact more traffic than we served in all 2003 *combined* (that's right, add up the totals of each of those 12 months and you are just shy of the *increase* in traffic from the first three months this year to the second three months).

Given our continued rapid growth in spite of our Google rank situation, I think an exponentially growing number of people are starting to go to Wikipedia *first* and then using Google in the increasingly rare cases that Wikipedia did not have all the info they needed.

So the Google effect, like the previous Slashdot effect, is starting to show some signs of having somewhat less influence on us, IMO. I won't be surprised if Google comes to us in a years time trying to push us into having Google ads.

NOTE: I just revised my January filler figure from 5000 K hits/day to 1600 K hits/day since that is the carry over number from the last time we had data (October 2003). Also, IIRC the server farm wasn't installed until late January so a lower figure is probably closer to reality.

This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches. Now our mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking news (where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the "second generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming" the Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the older mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.

This is indeed a problem, but a good one until we can firmly get a handle on our finances. The server situation would be much worse if the articles we host were still in the top ten like they were before Google changed their PageRank criteria. Since we do not get ad revenue from hits and our traffic/popularity is already growing exponentially, I don't see a problem with our mirrored content getting higher PageRanks than the originals. At least for now.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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