[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia growth since February 2004 greatly slowed

[Pete/Pcb21]

Christopher Mahan wrote:
> --- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>  
> 
>>First, our growth has to level off at some point.  Has to, dammit!
>>:-)
>>Maybe we're already maxed out; there's not really any way to know.
> 
> 
> I doubt we're anywhere close to maxing out.
> 

I've been meaning to find a peg to hang the following post on ever since 
I lost the post with mav's original 90% growth projections on:

All the evidence (see below) suggests that Wikipedia has *not* grown by 
a significant amount since the huge explosion in February/March 2004.

Now we have had a myriad of technical issues, and perhaps had reached 
capacity to prevent growth (until the most recent db master/slave 
setup). These are clearly key factors and I am expecting big growth in 
July.

''However'' I do not think it is a coincidence that this four months of 
little growth corresponds almost exactly with the period that Wikipedia 
has "disappered" from Google.

This time last year WP was very often top of typical searches. Now our 
mirrors always come out ahead except for very recently breaking news 
(where they don't have the new content yet). What I term the "second 
generation" mirrors (such as thefreedictionary.com) are "gaming" the 
Google algorithm much better than Wikipedia is, and in a way the older 
mirrors (4reference.net etc) didn't.

Assuming few technical restrictions, Wikipedia will grow, but I really 
think it will be at the low-end of Mav's predictions.

Pete/Pcb21 (knowing that people have been wrong on this before, but 
sticking the neck out anyway)

== Data ==
(en only in places)

As far as I know there are three places to get information about the 
growth of Wikipedia.

1) The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)

The daily average visits for the past months are:

Jul 2004 	270339 	
Jun 2004 	295800 	
May 2004 	274077 	
Apr 2004 	189930 	
Mar 2004 	280845 	
Feb 2004 	265556

There has not been much change in these -

(there has been change in some of the other statistics - I would need a 
tech to tell me what effect the new software had on this)

2) The Wikipedia Statistics pages 
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)

Feb 2004 741 new wikipedians 536 new articles (per day)
Mar 2004 824 new wikipedians 688 new articles
Apr 2004 689 new wikipedians 627 new articles
May 2004 615 new wikipedians 581 new articles
Jun 2004 326 new wikipedians 475 new articles

3) Alexa

- see the following graph
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page#graph
which shows Wikipedia has not grown in the last four/five months.