[Wikipedia-l] Re: Slashdot [OT]

[Carl Witty]

On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 05:44, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Anyhow, my research at the time suggested that for every *doubling* of
> traffic, you generally *halve* your rank.  That's a rough rule of
> thumb, but it held remarkably well.
> 
> That is, a site ranked 500 has twice the traffic of a site ranked
> 1000.  And a site ranked 845 has twice the traffic of a site ranked
> 1690.  If we are 2,140 and they are 845, then they have more than
> twice the traffic that we have.

Actually, I read somewhere that this seems to be a general law for all
kinds of rankings.  That is, if you rank cities in the United States (or
the world) by population, a city with twice the rank will have about
half the population.  If you rank English words by frequency of usage,
then a word with twice the rank will be used about half as often.  (And
of course there's nothing special about "doubling"; something with a
rank ten times as high will have one-tenth the popularity.)

Carl Witty