I don't know if anyone has noticed this yet, but Wikipedia has been mentioned on Slashdot again, and there have been a few vandals who seem to have arrived from there in the past few minutes. I suppose the "slashdot effect" may be imminent...
Adam Bishop
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Adam Bishop wrote:
I don't know if anyone has noticed this yet, but Wikipedia has been mentioned on Slashdot again, and there have been a few vandals who seem to have arrived from there in the past few minutes. I suppose the "slashdot effect" may be imminent...
According to Alexa we now get as much traffic as Slashdot. So it follows that they have as much to fear from us as we have to fear from them. Maybe if we mentioned Slashdot on our main page, they would get a sudden influx of visitors which they would be obliged to refer to as the "Wikipedia effect". :)
-- Tim Starling <tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau>
On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 10:19:30AM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
Adam Bishop wrote:
I don't know if anyone has noticed this yet, but Wikipedia has been mentioned on Slashdot again, and there have been a few vandals who seem to have arrived from there in the past few minutes. I suppose the "slashdot effect" may be imminent...
According to Alexa we now get as much traffic as Slashdot. So it follows that they have as much to fear from us as we have to fear from them. Maybe if we mentioned Slashdot on our main page, they would get a sudden influx of visitors which they would be obliged to refer to as the "Wikipedia effect". :)
I doubt that. The ./ comes due many people reading the same article at one time and following its links. But WP has to many articles and it's impossible to led all the read at one time to a certain article and it's links. But it's good to know that WP can handle slashdots (and umlauts ;-)
ciao, tom
Tim Starling wrote:
According to Alexa we now get as much traffic as Slashdot.
Indeed! Does anybody know how many "postings" per month Slashdot receives? The English Wikipedia had 125K "edits" in August 2003, coming from more than 2K different users.
My hypothesis is that trends in postings/edits/writes are predictors for trends in page views/visitors/reads. But I only have numbers for Wikipedia and a few wikis, not for other projects such as Slashdot.
Right now, susning.nu and the German Wikipedia are equal in size (each having 30K articles), but the German Wikipedia has twice the amount of edits per month (35K vs 18K). This either results in more articles or better articles, either of which should be a driver of future readership.
Tim Starling wrote:
According to Alexa we now get as much traffic as Slashdot.
I believe that you are mistaken. I see their traffic rank as 845, and ours as 2,140.
I used to have access to the MediaMetrix numbers, which were considered at the time industry standard. (Might still be, but since the dot-com crash, I don't fantasize about selling Bomis for billions anymore, so I don't worry about such things!)
Anyhow, my research at the time suggested that for every *doubling* of traffic, you generally *halve* your rank. That's a rough rule of thumb, but it held remarkably well.
That is, a site ranked 500 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1000. And a site ranked 845 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1690. If we are 2,140 and they are 845, then they have more than twice the traffic that we have.
(Actually I see now that the rank that they show is some kind of moving average, and that according to this url, our traffic just recently touched theirs. I'm skeptical, but we do rock.)
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3m&size=med...
--Jimbo
On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 05:44:10AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3m&size=med...
I doubt there is anything correct in these stats. It say that 5% go to fr.wikipedia and 3% to de... But looking at the stats (webalizer for example) I see that DE is about 2-3 times bigger.
ciao, tom
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
According to Alexa we now get as much traffic as Slashdot.
I believe that you are mistaken. I see their traffic rank as 845, and ours as 2,140.
I was just going off the entry in [[Wikipedia:Announcements]]. Anyway, even if they have double our traffic, I still don't think they're very scary.
-- Tim Starling <t<starling<physics<>unimelb>edu>au>
Tim Starling wrote:
I was just going off the entry in [[Wikipedia:Announcements]]. Anyway, even if they have double our traffic, I still don't think they're very scary.
Well, until we get our upgrades in place next week, I'm afraid of obscure Geocities homepages linking to us! ;-)
on 9/10/03 6:44 AM, Jimmy Wales at jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
According to Alexa we now get as much traffic as Slashdot.
I believe that you are mistaken. I see their traffic rank as 845, and ours as 2,140.
I used to have access to the MediaMetrix numbers, which were considered at the time industry standard. (Might still be, but since the dot-com crash, I don't fantasize about selling Bomis for billions anymore, so I don't worry about such things!)
Anyhow, my research at the time suggested that for every *doubling* of traffic, you generally *halve* your rank. That's a rough rule of thumb, but it held remarkably well.
That is, a site ranked 500 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1000. And a site ranked 845 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1690. If we are 2,140 and they are 845, then they have more than twice the traffic that we have.
(Actually I see now that the rank that they show is some kind of moving average, and that according to this url, our traffic just recently touched theirs. I'm skeptical, but we do rock.)
Slashdot has a good rate of growth over the last two years but has recently leveled off a bit. After all their appeal really is to the computer literate and wannabes, a limited audience. Our rate of growth is better and we potentially serve a mass audience in all languages. Unless there is some limiting factor we will soon equal and pass them. I would say within a year at most.
Fred
On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 05:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anyhow, my research at the time suggested that for every *doubling* of traffic, you generally *halve* your rank. That's a rough rule of thumb, but it held remarkably well.
That is, a site ranked 500 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1000. And a site ranked 845 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1690. If we are 2,140 and they are 845, then they have more than twice the traffic that we have.
Actually, I read somewhere that this seems to be a general law for all kinds of rankings. That is, if you rank cities in the United States (or the world) by population, a city with twice the rank will have about half the population. If you rank English words by frequency of usage, then a word with twice the rank will be used about half as often. (And of course there's nothing special about "doubling"; something with a rank ten times as high will have one-tenth the popularity.)
Carl Witty
On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 10:12:11AM -0700, Carl Witty wrote:
On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 05:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anyhow, my research at the time suggested that for every *doubling* of traffic, you generally *halve* your rank. That's a rough rule of thumb, but it held remarkably well.
That is, a site ranked 500 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1000. And a site ranked 845 has twice the traffic of a site ranked 1690. If we are 2,140 and they are 845, then they have more than twice the traffic that we have.
Actually, I read somewhere that this seems to be a general law for all kinds of rankings. That is, if you rank cities in the United States (or the world) by population, a city with twice the rank will have about half the population. If you rank English words by frequency of usage, then a word with twice the rank will be used about half as often. (And of course there's nothing special about "doubling"; something with a rank ten times as high will have one-tenth the popularity.)
Yes, this is known in statistics as the Yule distribution. The observation that the Yule distribution holds for English words is known as Zipf's law. The fact that this holds for websites also seems to be well known, in the context of weblogs - http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html ("Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" by Clay Shriky.) The law is a simple consequence of modeling a web surfer as a random monkey (clicks on a random link on the current web page, after a while gets bored and goes to a random web page), which is also the same model used by google to calculate pagerank.
Arvind
Arvind Narayanan wrote:
The law is a simple consequence of modeling a web surfer as a random monkey
Interestingly enough, this is why Bomis is so successful, too. As nearly as we have been able to determine, our most avid users are random monkeys. :-)
--Jimbo
--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
According to Alexa we now get as much traffic as
Slashdot.
I believe that you are mistaken. I see their traffic rank as 845, and ours as 2,140.
I dont think its as complicated as that. The 2140 and the 845 represent 3 month averages. Of course WP is going to reflect lower numbers than it has currently if has to account for the last three months. What matters is that WP is shooting upward at a 33 #@(%!^& degree angle while Slashdot has been flat. And on recent brief moments WP surpassed Slashdot-- They have a slow week, WP has an up week -- boom. For all intents and purposes, given that the trends hold, WP will be neck and neck with Slashdot in about a week.
So I only care about their up to the minute marks. This number is the least arbitrary -- the overall may have some value with marketers... But I dont understand why we would care about their overall ranking-- unless, Jim you're considering.... selling advertising? (?). : ]
Of course, all of this is speculative--in part, because Alexa has yet to register the effects of yesterdays poor server performance, -- which may mostly be mitigated by the fast response today. Pedians are loyal and understanding. But some were complaining yesterday about the slowness, which is why I added a little "but running slow" tag to the "Server is back up" note on recent changes. With the web the masses are always unsure of whats going on if nobody tells them whats going on. In troubling times, calm words of reassurance can soothe the savage Wikipediholic.
"I'm skeptical, but we do rock." Hear hear. ~S~
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Steve Vertigum wrote:
have some value with marketers... But I dont understand why we would care about their overall ranking-- unless, Jim you're considering.... selling advertising? (?). : ]
Please, don't even joke about that! :-) I can't take any more grief over things I'm actually against.
I'm feverishly at work today puzzling over motherboard specs and other such annoying information to order the parts for next week's upgrades.
I might even go to California to work on it myself.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
(Actually I see now that the rank that they show is some kind of moving average, and that according to this url, our traffic just recently touched theirs. I'm skeptical, but we do rock.)
It is clear that Wikipedia grows in size, and this should be reflected in traffic. But I find it hard to believe that Slashdot is growing any much bigger than it already is. Slashdot feels like a "mature" phenomenon (even if the contents gets less and less "mature"). The main difference is that Slashdot is what they produced in the last week, but Wikipedia is the accumulated sum of all we ever produced.
Slashdot is a river and Wikipedia is a lake.
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