Ray Saintonge wrote:
The underlying premise is that growth is exponential. People more commonly encounter this with compound interest calculations. Thus $1,000 invested at 12% for one year will give $1,120 at the end of the year. If it is compounded semi-annually it will give 1.06 * 1.06 * 1000 or $1,123.60 at the end of the year. If it is compounded monthly it will give (1.01)^12 * 1000 = $1,126.83 at the end of the year. The calculationsa that I made are similar, although I have not taken into account any limitations that may exist upon Wikipedia's growth.
The annual growth rate based on 0.632% per day would be (1.00632)^365
- 1 = 896.861%
Based on 0.410% per day it would be 345.239% These figures do seem quite high, but for a reality check Wikipedia's size on September 9 of this year was 42,021 and on September 9, 2001 it was 11,208. 42021/11208 is 3.44920, i.e. growth of 274.920%. but this does include some periods when the growth was considerable lower than it has been in the last 30 days.
Eclecticology
The graph half way down at [[Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia]] illustrates this rather nicely.
It looks exponential to me, with a kink for the Great Slowdown of the Phase II software. Recent growth is about 217 articles/day for a size of about 42000 articles, and that's about 0.5% / day.
Extrapolated to 1 year, that's growth of about 500% (ie a factor of six size ratio) per year. The implications of this are huge, ''if'' this sort of growth rate keeps up. In a year's time, we can expect not 100,000 articles, but over 250,000. Then -- almost unbelievably -- 3 million the next year.
This suggests that we will definitely need some more scaling features in the software sooner rather than later.
Neil