Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
At 2002-09-10 14:09 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Using the data set given, and assuming averaged daily growth between given days, Wikipedia has since 2001-03-07 had an average over all daily growth of 0.632%
The average growth rate (r) between two sampling days was calculated using
1+r=(d2/d1)^(1/n)
where d1 and d2 are the sample amounts on the first and second days and n is the number of days between samplings.
The 0.632% amount is a weighted mean of these results over a period of 551 days. Applying the formula:
n=log(100,000/42021)/log(1+r)
gives 138 days when rounded up to the nearest whole number. Thus the formula projects that article number 100,000 will be reached on 2003-01-24 Using the same techniques, growth in the last 30 days has been at the more modest rate of 0.410% per day. Projecting this gives a figure of 212 days or 2003-04-08
And suppose I hadn't wasted 10 years of my life on a technical university, how would you explain this to me?
What for example is the growth per year?
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