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

[Pete/Pcb21]

Thanks for the reply Jimmy.

I can imagine how it is very important to get the figures right, and 
with all the different data we are seeing, the maxim "lies, damn lies 
and statistics" never seemed truer!

1) I absolutely agree that I shouldn't have concentrated only en. 
Overall growth is higher than en growth

2) I would like to be able to trust the webalizers stats more. The 
figures seem do seem to be a bit all over the place. The following 
annualized figures show the different growth rates for the different 
statistics from February to July

By hits: 999% annually
By files: 1095% annually
By pages: 257% annually
By visits: 9% annually

The same figures from March to July

By hits: 1049% annually
By files: 996% annually
By pages: 860% annually
By visits: -6% annually

I do not know how to reconcile the hits/files/pages with the visits 
figures. I guess you covered that with your chat with the developers 
yesterday?

Over the same period of time, the number of active wikipedians (i.e. 
wikipedians making 5 edits or more) is, as we agree, roughly stable 
(since the huge jump at the end of February). ''If'' we make the 
assumption that no. of wikipedians is constantly proportional to the 
number of visitors, then these growth rates (>800%) can not be true. Now 
it stands to reason that over time, as the encyclopedias mature, the 
visitor to editor ratio should increase. But by that much? By instincts 
say no.

Alexa has problems to be sure. Looking at a spread of sites, it appears 
that virtually all English language sites are going down, at the expense 
of a mix of sino-japanese sites. This is likely to reflect how the alexa 
toolbar is distributed more than anything else. In that sense WP may be 
doing extremely by staying more or less constant for the last three or 
four months (that does appear to be the case even taking into logarithms 
- the +86 appears to be the change in the last three months average 
against the previous three months - i.e. comparing Jan-March to 
April-June which seems ok), WP is "swimming against the tide" and doing 
well.

Key conclusion: We still have growth, it is rapid, it is still limited 
by server capacity more than a limit to natural demand. However the 90% 
per quarter (1300% per year) estimate seems too excessive.

Pete

p.s. I agree with the other posters that it is great (in one sense) that 
the mirrors are "shouldering the burden". Would "360 million pageviews 
per month, probably at least half a billion when other users of our free 
content are taken into account, extremely confident it will be a billion 
by Christmas" be snappy enough for journalists?





Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> Pete, I think you're not reading the evidence correctly, but I think
> that we need to make sure we get this right.  Forecasting the future
> is tricky enough, and we can only do it well if we understand the
> past.
> 
> So I invite real scrutiny of all these numbers, because I really need
> to know the right answer.
> 
> 
>>1) The Webalizer pages: (http://wikimedia.org/stats/en.wikipedia.org/)
> 
> 
> Look at pageviews per day... 
> February 2004 3.01 million
> June 2004, 5.28 million
> 
> For the intervening months, there are significant problems with the
> averages due to some missing data.  (For example, several days in
> April are in the dataset and part of the denominator but clearly have
> missing data, for example showing 94 pageviews in a day.)
> 
> Additionally, it is a very big mistake when talking about growth to
> focus solely on en.  En is not the fastest growing wikipedia, in terms
> of traffic percentages.
> 
> You can see the growth better here:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesUsagePageRequest.htm
> 
> Notice in particular the dramatic spike in June which is continuing
> unabated into July.  This spike, I believe, corresponds with the
> acquisition of new servers.
> 
> 
>>2) The Wikipedia Statistics pages 
>>(http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm)
> 
> 
> A better page (to get the global perspective) is here:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm
> 
> It does seem true that the number of new wikipedians peaked in March,
> but notice the big spike in de.wikipedia which distorts the statistic
> to some degree.  en has experienced similar spikes before, and the
> subsequent decline after a spike was not indicative of the long term
> trend, which continues generally to be strongly positive.
>  
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> Given that we know traffic has more than doubled in that time frame, this bears taking a closer look.
> 
> I think this picture is more informative:
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=large&compare_sites=&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page#graph
> 
> Here, you have to remember that the chart is logarithmic, *and* that
> increases in rank require different increases in traffic as different
> scales.  That is, to go from #10,000 to #1,000 is less of an
> achievement than to go from #1,000 to #100.  (Almost any website can
> spike into the top 1,000 if it gets press coverage of the right sort.)
> 
> Look at that picture and recognize that if we blipped up to #1, it
> would look like a minor blip, due to the logarithmic nature of the
> chart.
> 
> Alexa shows our 3 mos change as being +86 (in rank), and since we are
> already in the ballpark of 600, that representents a substantial
> traffic increase.
> 
> And finally, Alexa numbers are fun to look at, but they do not
> accurately represent real traffic numbers.  If you look up Bomis on
> there, you'll see a precipitous decline -- but from our perspective
> (at Bomis), traffic was stable for that same time period.  (Of course
> being stable while everyone else is growing is one possible
> explanation, but another explanation is that Alexa stats are
> questionable anyway.)
> 
> After a chat with the developers yesterday, I'm comfortable (for now)
> with the number of 360 million pageviews per month.  If that's wrong,
> I need to know soon, because I'm going to say that number in public.
> 
> --Jimbo