Wikipedia Growth Animation | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia Growth Animation

stats.wikimedia.org

Really puts things in perspective once you switch to linear from log view (Top left corner).

Wikipedia chart of the "unsustainable" decline in administrator participation:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...

This relates to how much editorial attention each article can get as the number of articles grows. This has implications for Wikipedia's goal

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...

of improving content quality.

That's such a deceiving graph. It started off at 910, then went up to 1010 and then down to 850. It's not that big of a big deal. That graph makes it look like it's the equivalent of the Great Depression.

There's rarely any reason to mark your y-axis from an arbitrary starting point, unless your purpose is to manipulate people (wikipedia admins missing on wikipedia?).

I generally agree, but this instance is an example of the one situation in which it is reasonable, namely, trends. There really should be a zoomed-out view as well for people who aren't familiar with past developments, but it's okay to put the main focus on the small detail.

Anybody recognize that the number of articles stopped increasing after a couple of years?

As of today it is virtually impossible for a new wikipedia author to add a new article to the german Wikipedia. It will be deleted within a blink.

But hey, if this means that the world knowledge is asymptotically converging to a maximum, there is hope that we'll someday know it all, after all.

-jsl

Confusingly, by default, the graph is on a logarithmic scale. You can change it to a linear one, try it and see; it looks like its growth is constant.

Although I too would like to think we are converging towards having cataloged all knowledge, if Wikipedia's growth is slowing down, I'd bet it's because of all of its bureaucracy.

These charts just don't feel right without Hans Rosling jumping up and down in front of them like a little kid.

For the baffled: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI

It's interesting to see that en.wp was the only project that experienced quadratic growth in the number of articles. en.wp and de.wp were pretty close in size until the start of 2006, when en.wp took off and de.wp continued with more or less linear growth.

I'm aware that the english speaking world is larger than the german speaking one, and that a feedback effect exists in large networks with little downtime (ie, no time of the day where contribution dies off, due to the geographical dispersion of english-speaking countries), but I'm still surprised that en.wp was the only project to experience quadratic growth.

A significant portion of articles on any wikipedia are about cities, towns, local governments, local businesses, minor celebrities, landmarks, &c. For major locations like New York or Berlin, there will of course be articles in many languages, but other things that are insignificant outside their locality are likely to only have an article in their native language. Take for example the Catalan wikipedia, which contains a large number of stubs with basic info on locations in rural Catalonia. [1] The English-speaking world is vastly larger in land area and population than the German-speaking world, so I speculate that the difference in size is due to the number of location-relevant articles.

[1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/geographically_dense_wikipedia.htm...

Thoughts on whether the plateaus are because of completeness or limited by the number of editors able to handle the number of articles?

The scale is logarithmic, so the plateau is a bit misleading.

I think because the default setting is a log scale. If you change it to linear, it doesn't plateau but growth does slow.

If you play it at logarithmic and slow, you will see actual plateaus and pulses of activity in the smaller languages. That was pretty interesting, to me.

Take it out of log view. It seems like languages quickly get to about 100,000 articles in a very short (relatively time span). I wonder if that's because there are a few hundred thousand universal articles and which they are.

I'm pretty surprised by a number of things here. First and foremost, how popular Polish and Catalan are. Secondly, I thought that there would be vastly more English articles than any other language, and this isn't the case.

Also esperanto being fourth in total number of articles for a while. Interseting and well executed, thanks for the link.

Unfortunately, on some of the smaller wikipedias (by users), automatic article creation through algorithmic translation of en.wp is fairly common. The result is a large volume of poor quality articles. Esperanto was one of the wikis that fell victim to this at first.

There are around 3,500,000 English articles (versus 1,200,000 German ones, the next largest language).

This isn't apparent in the graph as by default it has a logarithmic scale; you can set it to linear, try it and see.

For some reason the animation is extremelly slow and laggy on my netbook.

Today I learned about the existence of the Bavarian language.

http://bar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayern

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