I looked a little more into this, manualy tracing the path of 10 randomly chosen articles. I don't know what it does to the automatic path tracing idea but it did lead to a number of observations. First the data: 1. Abu Zubaydah <- Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi <- Abu Zubaydah (Circular orphan) nothing else leads to these two (Score 0) 2. Analysis of variance <- Statistics <- Main Page (Score 2) 3. Indianapolis Colts <- National Football League <- American football <- Sport <- Main Page (Score 4) -- ". <- Indiana <- United States (=United States of America) <- List of Countries (=Countries of the World) <- Geography <- Main Page (Score 5) - ", <- 1969 <- 20th century <- Historical timeline|Centuries <- Main Page (Score 4) 4. Jerry Springer <-List of television programs <-List of reference tables (=Reference tables) <- Main Page (Score 3) 5.Heinrich Schliemann <- Archaelogy <- Main Page (Score 2) 6. Hitchhiking <- User: Branko <- Special Pages: Registered Users (=User list) <- Main Page (Score 3) Same via User: Rootbeer Access is only through two user pages; it's an orphaned orphan! 7. Nursing <- Health science <- Main page (Score 2) 8. Vsevolod I, Prince of Kiev <- Kievan Rus' <-History of Russia (=Russian history) <- History <- Main Page (Score 4) A score of 3 was possible through the page [[User: H. Jonat]]. (I swear this was random; I didn't ask for THAT user to appear) 9. Morrisville <- Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages <- Wikipedia: utilities <- Main Page (Score 3) 10. Celestial sphere <- Astronomy and astrophysics <- Main Page (Score 2) Observations: 1. In the samples the longest minimum path to the Main Page was only 4 articles. Any article linked from a user page would be 3 steps away from the user page, but this should not be considered a meaningful path. 2. Two kinds of effectively orphan pages became evident, but these would never appear on the special page listing of orphans. In the first example two pages link to each other but nothing else links to them. In example 6 the only links to the article are on user pages. Who would ever think to look there for a reference to an article? 3. [[List of countries]] and [[United States]] should probably be linked from the Main Page. The numberr of paths through these is enormous. 4. Many of the links to [[United States]] are excessive. Many of the uses are in passing where more information about the United States is unlikely to be needed. I think we can always assume a very basic level of understanding about what is meant by "United States" What would surprise me most about those who don't have that very basic level of understanding is how they managed to find Wikipedia in the first place. Eclecticology

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

Jaap van Ganswijk 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

Hi Neil and Ray, At 2002-09-11 15:55 +0100, Neil Harris wrote: 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. 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

On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 08:35:22PM +0200, Jaap van Ganswijk wrote: I don't know about English Wikipedia, but all others certainly grow at exponential rate. If it isn't the case with English Wikipedia, then maybe the software is the bottleneck and too much time is spent on maintaince task.

Or, rather, 1.5 million. D'oh! But it's still amazing. Neil

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002 11:56:31 +0000 Nick Hill &lt;nick(a)nickhill.co.uk&gt; wrote: With such a scheme, IP blocking and anti-vandalism features would still be implemented in much the same way as they are now, on the main server, where the master database is held. The master server would handle html form puts. The update system can be achieved by either: 1) the main server creating SQL files to be emailed to mirror servers, signed with a key pair, sequentially numbered to ensure they are automatically processed in order this way, the server can run asynchronously with the mirrors which is better for reliability of the server. The server will not need to wait for connection responses from the mirror and updates will be cached in the mail system should the mirror be unavailable. The server will only need to create one email per update. The mail system infrastructure will take care of sending the data to each mirror. In fact, a system such as pipermail used on this list would solve the problem wonderfully. Mirror admins simply subscribe to the list to get all updates sent to their machine and can manually download updates they are missing from the list!) Or 2) by the master server opening a connection directly to the SQL daemon on each remote machine In which case the server will need to track what the mirrors have and have not received updates and need to wait for time-out on non-operational mirrors)(this system may open exploits on the server via the sql interface).

I don't think it would be a good idea to hardwire article *subject categories* at all. We had that discussion some time ago, as Lee said. I was talking about *article types*.