Hi Neil and Ray,
At 2002-09-11 15:55 +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
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.
I know what exponential behaviour is, I was just hoping you'd give the figures in a clearer way instead of as a formula. It's usual to give the growth per year as a percentage and/or to give the amount of time in which the amount doubles.
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.
Looks very linear to me.
And I think anyway, that the process will be more linear than exponential.
There are several aspects: - When the number of people contributing stays fixed and they write a fixed number of articles per time unit the growth will be linear. - People may get bored or frustrated however and produce less articles. They may also lack the knowledge to write about other than their favorite subjects. Even if they would write about non-favorite subjects it would go slower because they would have to do more research. - People will also spend time on improving articles instead of writing new ones and this get worse the more articles there are. - However, new people will join the club and therefore super linear behaviour could occur, but I think that the new people will at most counteract the amount that the other start writing less articles. - Even when people don't have to write articles themselves but can copy and edit them, the sources that they can easily copy them from may dry out over time. - And a major argument against super linear behaviour of the growth is, that the bigger the data base becomes, the more complicated and time consuming the interrelations will get. Which with a fixed staff would let the growth tend to logarithmic behaviour.
Given all these factors and the current graph, I think that the growth is more likely to be linear (and we should be happy enough with that).
Greetings, Jaap