Christopher Mahan wrote:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@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=lar... which shows Wikipedia has not grown in the last four/five months.