On 10/17/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Enwikipedia_articles_bios_200710.svg
And there's the answer. No. Rambot didn't affect the growth of
biographies much at all. There's a spike in early 2002 (can someone
check out what that is?), but the graph of biographies is basically
unaffected by rambot (late 2002, right?).
Thats not true, you just can't see it on that scale. The rate of new
article bio creation changed from an average of 4/day around 2002-07
to 15/day in 2003-02 and the rate has continued climbing generally
faster than the rate of new article creation has climbed since.
The early spike is almost certainly the conversion script artifact.
Perhaps rambot has nothing to do with it, but the bio creation
behavior did change around that time.
You need to look at smoothed data because there is a huge weekly cycle
in all WP data. ;)
A non-exponential graph focusing on the months right
around the rambot
push would make this more clear. Are the raw numbers available
somewhere?
Linked directly from the image page.