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